from his old Aunt de Melcourt; he might die.  If none of these things happened, there were still ways and means by which he might make money in big strokes and “square himself” without any one ever being the wiser.  He had known of cases, or, at least, he had suspected them, in which men in precisely his position had averted by daring play the deadliest peril and gone down into honored graves.  Fortune had generally favored him hitherto, and probably would favor him again.

So after the first dreadful days of seeing his “mistakes,” and, in his recoil, calling himself by opprobrious names, he began to get used to his situation and boldly to meet its requirements.  That he would prove equal to them he had scarcely any doubt.  It was, in fact, next to inconceivable that a man of his antecedents and advantages should be unable to cope with conditions that, after all, were not wholly exceptional in the sordid history of business.

He admitted that the affair was sordid, while finding an excuse for his own connection with it in the involuntary defilement that comes from touching pitch.  It was impossible, he said, for a man of business not to touch pitch, and he was not a man of business of his own accord.  The state of life had been forced on him.  He was a trustee of other people’s property by inheritance, just as a man becomes a tsar.  As a career it was one of the last he would have chosen.  Had he received from his father an ample personal fortune instead of a mere lucrative practice he would have been a country gentleman, in the English style, with, of course, a house in town.  Born with a princely aptitude for spending his own money, he felt it hard that he should have been compelled to make it his life’s work to husband that of others.  The fact that he had always, to some extent been a square man in a round hole seemed to entitle him to a large share of moral allowance, especially in his judgment on himself.  He emphasized the last consideration, since it enabled him, in his moments of solitude, to look himself more straightly in the face.  It helped him to buttress up his sense of honor, and so his sense of energy, to be able to say, “I am still a gentleman.”

He came in time to express it otherwise, and to say, “I must still play the gentleman.”  He came to define also what he meant by the word still.  The future presented itself as a succession of stages, in which this could not happen till that had happened, nor the final disaster arrive till all the intervening phases of the situation had been passed.  He had passed them.  Of late he had seen that the flames of hell would get hold upon him at that exact instant when, the last defense having been broken down and the last shift resorted to, he should turn the key on all outside hope, and be alone with himself and the knowledge that he could do no more.  Till then he could ward them off, and he had been fighting them to the latest second.  But on coming home from his office in Boston that afternoon he had told himself that the game was up.  Nothing as far as he could see would give him the respite of another four and twenty hours.  The minutes between him and the final preparations could be counted with the finger on the clock.