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.