ertheless they loved him.
I think the secret of it was chiefly in this,--that he seemed to
think so little of himself.

But now as he walked home in the middle of the night from Cecil
Street to Cavendish Square he did think much of himself. Indeed such
self-thoughts come naturally to all men, be their outward conduct
ever so reckless. Every man to himself is the centre of the whole
world;--the axle on which it all turns. All knowledge is but his own
perception of the things around him. All love, and care for others,
and solicitude for the world's welfare, are but his own feelings as
to the world's wants and the world's merits.

He had played his part as a centre of all things very badly. Of that
he was very well aware. He had sense enough to know that it should be
a man's lot to earn his bread after some fashion, and he often told
himself that never as yet had he earned so much as a penny roll. He
had learned to comprehend that the world's progress depends on the
way in which men do their duty by each other,--that the progress
of one generation depends on the discharge of such duties by that
which preceded it;--and he knew that he, in his generation, had done
nothing to promote such progress. He thoroughly despised himself,--if
there might be any good in that! But on such occasions as these, when
the wine he had drunk was sufficient only to drive away from him the
numbness of despair, when he was all alone with the cold night air
upon his face, when the stars were bright above him and the world
around him was almost quiet, he would still ask himself whether
there might not yet be, even for him, some hope of a redemption,
--some chance of a better life in store for him. He was still
young,--wanting some years of thirty. Could there be, even for him,
some mode of extrication from his misery?

We know what was the mode which now, at this moment, was suggesting
itself to him. He was proposing to himself, as the best thing that he
could do, to take away another man's wife and make himself happy with
her! What he had said to Vavasor as to disregarding Lady Glencora's
money had been perfectly true. That in the event of her going off
with him, some portion of her enormous wealth would still cling to
her, he did believe. Seeing that she had no children he could not
understand where else it should all go. But he thought of this
as it regarded her, not as it regarded him. When he had before
made his suit to her,--a suit which