rvices at any price; to bribe him
into silence.

His worst misgivings had never included such a possibility. In fact,
before going down to Devonshire he had never had any serious
misgivings at all. His position in his father's shop had hitherto
presented no difficulties to a sensitive honour. He had not been sure
that his honour was particularly sensitive, not more so, he supposed,
than other people's. Acting as part of the machinery of Rickman's, he
had sometimes made a clever bargain; he had never, so far as he knew,
driven a hard one. He was expected to make clever bargains, to buy
cheap and sell dear, to watch people's faces, lowering the price by
their anxiety to sell, raising it by their eagerness to buy. That was
his stern duty in the second-hand department. But there had been so
many occasions on which he had never done his duty; times when he was
tempted to actual defiance of it, when a wistful calculating look in
the eyes of some seedy scholar would knock all the moral fibre out of
him, and a two and sixpenny book would go for ninepence or a shilling.
And such was his conception of loyalty to Rickman's, that he generally
paid for these excesses out of his own pocket, so that conscience was
satisfied both ways. Therefore there had been no moral element in his
dislike to Rickman's; he had shrunk from it with the half-fantastic
aversion of the mind, not with this sickening hatred of the soul.
After three weeks of Lucia Harden's society, he had perceived how
sordid were the beginnings from which his life had sprung. As his
boyish dreams had been wrought like a broidery of stars on the floor
of the back-shop, so honour, an unattainable ideal, had stood out in
forlorn splendour against a darker and a dirtier background. He had
felt himself obscurely tainted and involved. Now he realized, as he
had never realized before, that the foundations of Rickman's were laid
in bottomless corruption. It was a House built, not only on every vile
and vulgar art known to trade, but on many instances of such a day's
work as this. And it was into this pit of infamy that his father was
blandly inviting him to descend. He had such an abominably clear
vision of it that he writhed and shuddered with shame and disgust; he
could hardly have suffered more if he had gone down into it bodily
himself. He endured in imagination the emotions that his father should
have felt and apparently did not feel.

He came out of his shudderings and writ