In doing the deed he had not suffered much, though the circumstances which had led to the doing of it had been full of pain.  There had been an actual pleasure to him in thus showing himself to be superior to the conventionalities of the world.  There was Augustus still ready to occupy the position to which he had in truth been born.  And at the moment Mountjoy had gone—­he knew not where.  There had been gambling debts which, coming as they did after many others, he had refused to pay.  He himself was dying at the moment, as he thought.  It would be better for him to take up with Augustus.  Mountjoy he must leave to his fate.  For such a son, so reckless, so incurable, so hopeless, it was impossible that anything farther should be done.  He would at least enjoy the power of leaving those wretched creditors without their money.  There would be some triumph, some consolation, in that.  So he had done, and now his heir turned against him!

It was very bitter to him, as he lay thinking of it all.  He was a man who was from his constitution and heart capable of making great sacrifices for those he loved.  He had a most thorough contempt for the character of an honest man.  He did not believe in honesty, but only in mock honesty.  And yet he would speak of an honest man with admiration, meaning something altogether different from the honesty of which men ordinarily spoke.  The usual honesty of the world was with him all pretence, or, if not, assumed for the sake of the character it would achieve.  Mr. Grey he knew to be honest; Mr. Grey’s word he knew to be true; but he fancied that Mr. Grey had adopted this absurd mode of living with the view of cheating his neighbors by appearing to be better than others.  All virtue and all vice were comprised by him in the words “good-nature” and “ill-nature.”  All church-going propensities,—­and these propensities in his estimate extended very widely,—­he scorned from the very bottom of his heart.  That one set of words should be deemed more wicked than another, as in regard to swearing, was to him a sign either of hypocrisy, of idolatry, or of feminine weakness of intellect.  To women he allowed the privilege of being, in regard to thought, only something better than dogs.  When his sister Martha shuddered at some exclamation from his mouth, he would say to himself simply that she was a woman, not an idiot or a hypocrite.  Of women, old and young, he had been very fond, and in his manner to them very tender; but when a woman rose to a way of thinking akin to his own, she was no longer a woman to his senses.  Against such a one his taste revolted.  She sunk to the level of a man contaminated by petticoats.  And law was hardly less absurd to him than religion.  It consisted of a perplexed entanglement of rules got together so that the few might live in comfort at the expense of the many.