With his experience of other women’s explicit and even eager obedience, the resistance which he had at first encountered in Grace gave zest to her final submission.  Since he had demolished the position she had attempted to hold against him, he liked her for having imagined she could hold it; and she had continued to pique and interest him.  He relished all her scruples and misgivings, and the remorse she had tried to confide to him; and if his enjoyment of these foibles of hers took too little account of her pain, it was never his characteristic to be tender of people in good health.  He was, indeed, as alien to her Puritan spirit as if he had been born in Naples instead of Corbitant.  He came of one of those families which one finds in nearly every New England community, as thoroughly New England in race as the rest, but flourishing in a hardy scepticism and contempt of the general sense.  Whatever relation such people held to the old Puritan commonwealth when Puritanism was absolute, they must later have taken an active part in its disintegration, and were probably always a destructive force at its heart.

Mulbridge’s grandfather was one of the last captains who sailed a slaver from Corbitant.  When this commerce became precarious, he retired from the seas, took a young wife in second marriage, and passed his declining days in robust inebriety.  He lived to cast a dying vote for General Jackson, and his son, the first Dr. Mulbridge, survived to illustrate the magnanimity of his fellow-townsmen during the first year of the civil war, as a tolerated Copperhead.  Then he died, and his son, who was in the West, looking up a location for practice, was known to have gone out as surgeon with one of the regiments there.  It was not supposed that he went from patriotism; but when he came back, a year before the end of the struggle, and settled in his native place, his service in the army was accepted among his old neighbors as evidence of a better disposition of some sort than had hitherto been attributable to any of his name.

In fact, the lazy, good-natured boy, whom they chiefly remembered before his college days, had always been well enough liked among those who had since grown to be first mates and ship captains in the little port where he was born and grew up.  They had now all retired from the sea, and, having survived its manifold perils, were patiently waiting to be drowned in sail-boats on the bay.  They were of the second generation of ships’ captains still living in Corbitant; but they would be the last.  The commerce of the little port had changed into the whaling trade in their time; this had ceased in turn, and the wharves had rotted away.  Dr. Mulbridge found little practice among them; while attending their appointed fate, they were so thoroughly salted against decay as to preserve even their families.  But he gradually gathered into his hands, from the clairvoyant and the Indian doctor, the business which they had shared