brilliant career. He would show his father that, even if the training of
a gentleman develops tastes above the coarseness of commerce, it also
develops the mental superiority that makes fleeing chaff of the obstacles
to fame and wealth. He did not go far into details; but, as his essays at
Harvard had been praised, he thought of giving literature's road to
distinction the preference over the several others that must be smooth
before him. Daylight put these imaginings into silly countenance, and he
felt silly for having lingered in their company, even in the dark. As he
dressed he had much less than his wonted content with himself. He did not
take the same satisfaction in his clothes, as evidence of his good taste,
or in his admired variations of the fashion of wearing the hair and tying
the scarf. Midway in the process of arranging his hair he put down his
military brushes; leaning against the dressing table, he fixed his mind
upon the first serious thoughts he had ever had in his whole
irresponsible, sheltered life. "Well," he said, half-aloud, "there _is_
something wrong! If there isn't, why do I feel as if my spine had
collapsed?" After a long pause, he added: "And it has! All that held it
steady was father's hand."

The whole lofty and beautiful structure of self-complacence upon which
he had lounged, preening his feathers and receiving social triumphs and
the adulation of his "less fortunate fellows" as the due of his own
personal superiority, suddenly slipped from under him. With a rueful
smile at his plight, he said: "The governor has called me down." Then,
resentfully, and with a return of his mood of dignity outraged and pride
trampled upon: "But he had no right to put me up there--or let me climb
up there." Once a wrong becomes "vested," it is a "vested right," sacred,
taboo. Arthur felt that his father was committing a crime against him.

When he saw Adelaide and his mother their anxious looks made him furious.