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?”

Richard’s laugh, taken up by horrid reverberations, as it were through the lengths of the Lower Halls, replied.

This colloquy of two voices in a brain was concluded by Sir Austin asking again if there were no actual difference between the flower of his hopes and yonder drunken weed, and receiving for answer that there was a decided dissimilarity in the smell of the couple; becoming cognizant of which he retreated.

Sir Austin did not battle with the tempter.  He took him into his bosom at once, as if he had been ripe for him, and received his suggestions and bowed to his dictates.  Because he suffered, and decreed that he would suffer silently, and be the only sufferer, it seemed to him that he was great-minded in his calamity.  He had stood against the world.  The world had beaten him.  What then?  He must shut his heart and mask his face; that was all.  To be far in advance of the mass, is as fruitless to mankind, he reflected, as straggling in the rear.  For how do we know that they move behind us at all, or move in our track?  What we win for them is lost; and where we are overthrown we lie!

It was thus that a fine mind and a fine heart at the bounds of a nature not great, chose to colour his retrogression and countenance his shortcoming; and it was thus that he set about ruining the work he had done.  He might well say, as he once did, that there are hours when the clearest soul becomes a cunning fox.  For a grief that was private and peculiar, he unhesitatingly cast the blame upon humanity; just as he had accused it in the period of what he termed his own ordeal.  How had he borne that?  By masking his face.  And he prepared the ordeal for his son by doing the same.  This was by no means his idea of a man’s duty in tribulation, about which he could be strenuously eloquent.