breakfast, and he had read the article again, he did not view it with quite the same air of detachment with which he had contemplated it at first. By nature he was immensely impatient of criticism. He accepted his own superiority to all the rest of the world without question, but like an arbitrary despot, he could not suffer the power of which he felt so secure to suffer misinterpretation, or the motives that impelled it to be called in question. His pride, after all, was of a ferocious and aggressive kind. The old judge's appeal had humiliated him bitterly. This newspaper article filled him with the fury that it would have filled Voltaire.
"I see what it is," he said, filling his pipe. "They are all in the ring, and they are afraid a rank outsider is going to break it. And so he shall!"
He finished with a volley of oaths.
The next moment tears had sprung to his eyes. Tears of chagrin, rage, disgust, of resentment against himself. How dare he be so arrogant when the words of the honest old man, spoken while the hand of death was upon him, were still in his ears. Mediocrity had its function, its reason to be. Until he had grasped that elementary truth he could never emerge, clad in valor and completeness, upon that high platform which nature had designed him to occupy. "Cad" Northcote had been the name bestowed upon him at school by his humbler but honester fellows: the same term of opprobrium had now been applied to him in a more public manner.
It was unworthy that he should ascribe the bitter antagonism he had raised against himself to the
