onet remembered how often he had compared
his boy with this one: his own bright boy! And where was the difference
between them?

"Mere outward gilding!" said his familiar.

"Yes," he responded, "I daresay this one never positively plotted
to deceive his father: he followed his appetites unchecked, and is
internally the sounder of the two."

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 min