rd. 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.

In the matter of preparation the most important detail would be to tell
Olivia. Hoping against hope that this would never become necessary, he
had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel. But
he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered
with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now,
when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed. As he turned into
his own grounds that