Hubbard which lay before him. In the sleepless hours
of the night, Fenton had gone over the ground again and again; he had
painted to himself the baseness of the thing he meant to do, and all
his instincts of loyalty, of taste, of good-breeding, rose against it;
but none the less did he cling doggedly to his determination. His
purpose never wavered. His decision had been made, and this summing up
of the cost did not shake him; it only made him miserable by the keen
appreciation it brought him of the bitter humiliation fate--for so he
viewed it--was heaping upon his head.
The strength and weakness which are often mingled in one character,
like the iron and clay in the image of the prophet's vision, make the
most surprising of the many strange paradoxes of human life. Fenton was
sensuous, selfish, yielding, yet he possessed a tenacity of purpose, a
might of will, which nothing could shake. He looked across the table
now, at his sweet-faced, clear-eyed wife, with a dreadful sense of her
purity, her honor, her remoteness; it cut him to the quick to think
that the breach of trust he had in view would fill her mind with
loathing; yet the possibility of therefore abandoning his purpose did
not occur to him. Indeed, such was his nature, that it might be said
that the possibility of abandoning his deliberately formed intention,
on this or on any other grounds, did not for him exist.
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