So they wrote a lie to Frank, and buried the secret in their breasts, and Oakley wore its visible form upon his heart.

XIV

FRANKENSTEIN

Five years is but a short time in the life of a man, and yet many things may happen therein.  For instance, the whole way of a family’s life may be changed.  Good natures may be made into bad ones and out of a soul of faith grow a spirit of unbelief.  The independence of respectability may harden into the insolence of defiance, and the sensitive cheek of modesty into the brazen face of shamelessness.  It may be true that the habits of years are hard to change, but this is not true of the first sixteen or seventeen years of a young person’s life, else Kitty Hamilton and Joe could not so easily have become what they were.  It had taken barely five years to accomplish an entire metamorphosis of their characters.  In Joe’s case even a shorter time was needed.  He was so ready to go down that it needed but a gentle push to start him, and once started, there was nothing within him to hold him back from the depths.  For his will was as flabby as his conscience, and his pride, which stands to some men for conscience, had no definite aim or direction.

Hattie Sterling had given him both his greatest impulse for evil and for good.  She had at first given him his gentle push, but when she saw that his collapse would lose her a faithful and useful slave she had sought to check his course.  Her threat of the severance of their relations had held him up for a little time, and she began to believe that he was safe again.  He went back to the work he had neglected, drank moderately, and acted in most things as a sound, sensible being.  Then, all of a sudden, he went down again, and went down badly.  She kept her promise and threw him over.  Then he became a hanger-on at the clubs, a genteel loafer.  He used to say in his sober moments that at last he was one of the boys that Sadness had spoken of.  He did not work, and yet he lived and ate and was proud of his degradation.  But he soon tired of being separated from Hattie, and straightened up again.  After some demur she received him upon his former footing.  It was only for a few months.  He fell again.  For almost four years this had happened intermittently.  Finally he took a turn for the better that endured so long that Hattie Sterling again gave him her faith.  Then the woman made her mistake.  She warmed to him.  She showed him that she was proud of him.  He went forth at once to celebrate his victory.  He did not return to her for three days.  Then he was battered, unkempt, and thick of speech.

She looked at him in silent contempt for a while as he sat nursing his aching head.

“Well, you ’re a beauty,” she said finally with cutting scorn.  “You ought to be put under a glass case and placed on exhibition.”

He groaned and his head sunk lower.  A drunken man is always disarmed.