Crittenden

But even then nobody took him as seriously as he took himself. So that

while he fell just short, in his own eyes, of everything that was worth

while; of doing something and being something worth while; believing

something that made the next world worth while; or gaining the love of a

woman that would have made this life worth while--in the eyes of his own

people he was merely sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race,

and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by--that was the

indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant

student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet. He

had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen

argument until that philosopher was glad to mark him highest in his

class and let him go. He surprised the old lawyers when it came to a

discussion of the pure theory of law, and, on the one occasion when his

mother's pastor came to see him, he disturbed that good man no little,

and closed his lips against further censure of him in pulpit or in

private. So that all that was said against him by the pious was that he

did not go to church as he should; and by the thoughtful, that he was

making a shameful waste of the talents that the Almighty had showered so

freely down upon him. And so without suffering greatly in public

estimation, in spite of the fact that the ideals of Southern life were

changing fast, he passed into the old-young period that is the critical

time in the lives of men like him--when he thought he had drunk his cup

to the dregs; had run the gamut of human experience; that nothing was

left to his future but the dull repetition of his past. Only those who

knew him best had not given up hope of him, nor had he really given up

hope of himself as fully as he thought. The truth was, he never fell

far, nor for long, and he always rose with the old purpose the same,

even if it stirred him each time with less and less enthusiasm--and

always with the beacon-light of one star shining from his past, even

though each time it shone a little more dimly. For usually, of course,

there is the hand of a woman on the lever that prizes such a man's life

upward, and when Judith Page's clasp loosened on Crittenden, the castle

that the lightest touch of her finger raised in his imagination--that

he, doubtless, would have reared for her and for him, in fact, fell in

quite hopeless ruins, and no similar shape was ever framed for him above

its ashes.