After three weeks of Lucia Harden's society, he had perceived how
sordid were the beginnings from which his life had sprung. As his
boyish dreams had been wrought like a broidery of stars on the floor
of the back-shop, so honour, an unattainable ideal, had stood out in
forlorn splendour against a darker and a dirtier background. He had
felt himself obscurely tainted and involved. Now he realized, as he
had never realized before, that the foundations of Rickman's were laid
in bottomless corruption. It was a House built, not only on every vile
and vulgar art known to trade, but on many instances of such a day's
work as this. And it was into this pit of infamy that his father was
blandly inviting him to descend. He had such an abominably clear
vision of it that he writhed and shuddered with shame and disgust; he
could hardly have suffered more if he had gone down into it bodily
himself. He endured in imagination the emotions that his father should
have felt and apparently did not feel.
He came out of his shudderings and writhings unspeakably consoled and
clean; knowing that it is with such nausea and pangs that the soul of
honour is born.
Their eyes met; and it was the elder Rickman's turn for bitterness. It
had come, the moment that he had dreaded. He was afraid to meet his
son's eyes, for he knew that they had judged him. He felt that he
stood revealed in that sudden illumination of the boy's radiant soul.
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