When it gradually became clear to Stephen that he and his mother were unpopular people, his first feeling was one of resentment, his second of calm acquiescence:  acquiescence, first, because he recognized in a measure the justice of it,—­they really did not care for their neighbors; why should their neighbors care for them? secondly, a diminished familiarity of intercourse would have to him great compensations.  There were few people in the town, whose clothes, whose speech, whose behavior, did not jar upon his nerves.  On the whole, he would be better content alone; and if his mother could only have a little more independence of nature, more resource within herself, “The less we see of them, the better,” said Stephen, proudly.

He had yet to learn the lesson which, sooner or later, the proudest, most scornful, most self-centred of human souls must learn, or must die of loneliness for the want of learning, that humanity is one and indivisible; and the man who shuts himself apart from his fellows, above all, the man who thus shuts himself apart because he thinks of his fellows with pitying condescension as his inferiors, is a fool and a blasphemer,—­a fool, because he robs himself of that good-fellowship which is the leaven of life; a blasphemer, because he virtually implies that God made men unfit for him to associate with.  Stephen White had this lesson yet to learn.

The practical inconvenience of being unpopular, however, he began to feel keenly, as month after month passed by, and nobody would rent the other half of the house in which he and his mother lived.  Small as the rent was, it was a matter of great moment to them; for his earnings as clerk and copyist were barely enough to give them food.  He was still retained by his father’s partner in the same position which he had held during his father’s life.  But old Mr. Williams was not wholly free from the general prejudice against Stephen, as an aristocratic fellow, given to dreams and fancies; and Stephen knew very well that he held the position only as it were on a sort of sufferance, because Mr. Williams had loved his father.  Moreover, law business in Penfield was growing duller and duller.  A younger firm in the county town, only twelve miles away, was robbing them of clients continually; and there were many long days during which Stephen sat idle at his desk, looking out in a vague, dreamy way on the street below, and wondering if the time were really coming when Mr. Williams would need a clerk no longer; and, if it did come, what he could possibly find to do in that town, by which he could earn money enough to support his mother.  At such times, he thought uneasily of the possibility of foreclosing the mortgage on the old Jacobs house, selling the house, and reinvesting the money in a more advantageous way.  He always tried to put the thought away from him as a dishonorable one; but it had a fatal persistency.  He could not banish it.

“Poor, half-witted old woman! she might a great deal better be in the poor-house.”