jests he found himself awfully beset by a temptation which one of the
boat's crew placed before the passengers. This was a bucket full of
pebbles of inviting size; and the man said, "Now, see which can hit the
cliff. It's farther than any of you can throw, though it looks so near."

The passengers cast themselves upon the store of missiles, Colonel
Ellison most actively among them. None struck the cliff, and suddenly
Mr. Arbuton felt a blind, stupid, irresistible longing to try his
chance. The spirit of his college days, of his boating and ball-playing
youth, came upon him. He picked up a pebble, while Kitty opened her eyes
in a stare of dumb surprise. Then he wheeled and threw it, and as it
struck against the cliff with a shock that seemed to have broken all the
windows on the Back Bay, he exulted in a sense of freedom the havoc
caused him. It was as if for an instant he had rent away the ties of
custom, thrown off the bonds of social allegiance, broken down and
trampled upon the conventions which his whole life long he had held so
dear and respectable. In that moment of frenzy he feared himself capable
of shaking hands with the shabby Englishman in the Glengarry cap, or of
asking the whole admiring company of passengers down to the bar. A cry
of applause had broken from them at his achievement, and he had for the
first time tasted the sweets of popular favor. Of course a revulsion
must come, and it must be of a corresponding violence; and the next
moment Mr. Arbuton hated them all, and most of all Colonel Ellison, who
had been loudest in his praise. Him he thought for that moment
everything that was aggressively and intrusively vulgar. But he could
not utter these friendly impressions, nor is it so easy to withdraw from
any concession, and he found it impossible to repair his broken
defences. Destiny had been against him from the beginning, and now why
should he not strike hands with it for the brief half-day that he was to
continue in these people's society? In the morning he would part from