How are we to know when we are at the head and fountain of the fates of them we love?

There by the springs of Richard’s future, his father sat:  and the devil said to him:  “Only be quiet:  do nothing:  resolutely do nothing:  your object now is to keep a brave face to the world, so that all may know you superior to this human nature that has deceived you.  For it is the shameless deception, not the marriage, that has wounded you.”

“Ay!” answered the baronet, “the shameless deception, not the marriage:  wicked and ruinous as it must be; a destroyer of my tenderest hopes! my dearest schemes!  Not the marriage—­the shameless deception!” and he crumpled up his son’s letter to him, and tossed it into the fire.

How are we to distinguish the dark chief of the Manichaeans when he talks our own thoughts to us?

Further he whispered, “And your System:—­if you would be brave to the world, have courage to cast the dream of it out of you:  relinquish an impossible project; see it as it is—­dead:  too good for men!”

“Ay!” muttered the baronet:  “all who would save them perish on the Cross!”

And so he sat nursing the devil.

By and by he took his lamp, and put on the old cloak and cap, and went to gaze at Ripton.  That exhausted debauchee and youth without a destiny slept a dead sleep.  A handkerchief was bound about his forehead, and his helpless sunken chin and snoring nose projected up the pillow, made him look absurdly piteous.  The baronet remembered how often he had compared his boy with this one:  his own bright boy!  And where was the difference between them?

“Mere outward gilding!” said his familiar.

“Yes,” he responded, “I daresay this one never positively plotted to deceive his father:  he followed his appetites unchecked, and is internally the sounder of the two.”

Ripton, with his sunken chin and snoring nose under the light of the lamp, stood for human nature, honest, however abject.

“Miss Random, I fear very much, is a necessary establishment!” whispered the monitor.

“Does the evil in us demand its natural food, or it corrupts the whole?” ejaculated Sir Austin.  “And is no angel of avail till that is drawn off?  And is that our conflict—­to see whether we can escape the contagion of its embrace, and come uncorrupted out of that?”

“The world is wise in its way,” said the voice.

“Though it look on itself through Port wine?” he suggested, remembering his lawyer Thompson.

“Wise in not seeking to be too wise,” said the voice.

“And getting intoxicated on its drug of comfort!”

“Human nature is weak.”

“And Miss Random is an establishment, and Wild Oats an institution!”

“It always has been so.”

“And always will be?”

“So I fear! in spite of your very noble efforts.”

“And leads—­whither?  And ends—­where?”