ere as
he did last night. 'Character,' indeed! It was at the bottom of a pail
of beer or something worse."

"Oh, I don't think he was 'loaded.' He 's an author, and I guess his eye
got to rolling in a fine frenzy, and he had to hurry home to keep it
from rolling out of his head into the street."

"Mr. Perkins, this is no subject for fun. I have seen what I have seen,
and it was a most disgraceful spectacle. I take your word for it that
you were not with Mr. Brent, but you need not try to go further and
defend him."

"I 'm not trying to defend him at all; it 's really none of my
business." And Perkins went off to work, a little bit angry and a good
deal more bewildered. "I thought he was a 'jay,'" he remarked.

To Brent the day was a miserable one. He did not leave his room, but
spent the slow hours pacing back and forth in absorbed thought,
interrupted now and then by vain attempts to read. His mind was in a
state of despairing apprehension. It needed no prophetic sense to tell
him what would happen. It was only a question of how long a time would
elapse before he might expect to receive word from Dexter summoning him
home. It all depended upon whether or not the "California Pilgrim" got
money enough last night for exploiting his disgraceful history to finish
the last stage of the journey.

What disgusted the young man so intensely was that his father, after
having led the life he had, should make capital out of relating it.
Would not a quiet repentance, if it were real, have been quite
sufficient? He very much distrusted the sincerity of motive that made a
man hold himself up as an example of reformed depravity, when the hope
of gain was behind it all. The very charity which he had preached so
fiercely to his congregation he could not extend to his own father.
Indeed, it appeared to him (although this may have been a trick of his
distorted imagination) that the "Pilgrim" had seemed to take a sort of
pleasure in the record of his past, as though it were excellent to be
bad, in order to have the pleasure of conversion. His lip involuntarily
curled when he thought of conversion. He was disgusted with all men and
principles. One man offends, and a whole system suffers. He felt a
peculiar self-consciousness, a self-glorification in his own misery.
Placing the accumulated morality of his own life against the full-grown
evil of his father's, it angered him to think that by the intervention
of a seemingly slight quantity