It was almost
with the girl's voice that it seemed to plead with him,
to undo in him, effect by effect, the work of his
indignant resentment, to set all things in another and
fairer light, to give him hopes, to suggest palliations,
to protest against injustices. It WAS in Lapham's favour
that he was so guiltless in the past, and now Corey asked
himself if it were the first time he could have wished
a guest at his father's table to have taken less wine;
whether Lapham was not rather to be honoured for not knowing
how to contain his folly where a veteran transgressor
might have held his tongue. He asked himself, with a
thrill of sudden remorse, whether, when Lapham humbled
himself in the dust so shockingly, he had shown him
the sympathy to which such ABANDON had the right; and he
had to own that he had met him on the gentlemanly ground,
sparing himself and asserting the superiority of his sort,
and not recognising that Lapham's humiliation came from
the sense of wrong, which he had helped to accumulate upon
him by superfinely standing aloof and refusing to touch him.
He shut his desk and hurried out into the early night,
not to go anywhere, but to walk up and down, to try
to find his way out of the chaos, which now seemed ruin,
and now the materials out of which fine actions and a
happy life might be shaped.
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