So after the first dreadful days of seeing his "mistakes," and, in his
recoil, calling himself by opprobrious names, he began to get used to
his situation and boldly to meet its requirements. That he would prove
equal to them he had scarcely any doubt. It was, in fact, next to
inconceivable that a man of his antecedents and advantages should be
unable to cope with conditions that, after all, were not wholly
exceptional in the sordid history of business.

He admitted that the affair was sordid, while finding an excuse for his
own connection with it in the involuntary defilement that comes from
touching pitch. It was impossible, he said, for a man of business not to
touch pitch, and he was not a man of business of his own accord. 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