"Love!" muttered Mrs. Fox-Cordery, contemptuously.
"Or what she fancies is love; but I think she really loves the man, and I know what love will dare."
"For Heaven's sake," exclaimed Mrs. Fox-Cordery, "don't institute comparisons between you and her! She is not fit to black your shoes."
"She has polished them often enough," he remarked grimly; "but that is coming to an end now. A good job; I'm sick of the sight of her; I'm sick of myself; I'm sick of everything, and everybody."
"Not everybody, my love," she said, placing her hand on his shoulder fondly.
He shook her off, and she did not murmur. They resembled each other most wonderfully, but there was a marked difference in the quality of their affection. She--cold, hard, and ungenerous to all but him--was nobler than he, for she was ready and willing to sacrifice herself for him. It had been so from his birth, and her love had grown into a passion which nothing could affect, not even ingratitude and indifference from the son she adored. In her eyes he was a paragon; his vices were virtues, his meanness commendable, his trickery the proof of an ingenious mind. He could do no wrong. Quick to discover the least sign of turpitude in others, she discerned none in him; she was morally blind to his defects, and the last thing she would have believed him capable of was the Judas kiss.
Far different was it with him. He was conscious of all his mother's faults, and he excused her for none. His absorbing vanity so clouded his mind that it was only the baser qualities of those with whom he was associated that forced themselves upon his attention, and these being immediately accepted the door was closed upon the least attribute which rendered them worthy of respect and esteem. His chronic suspicion of his fellow-creatures did not spring from his intellect, but from those lower conditions of the affections in which the basest qualities of mankind occupy the prominent places. Theophrastus says that the suspicious man imputes a fraudulent intention to everyone with whom he has to do, and this was the case with Mr. Fox-Cordery, who viewed his mother--the one being in the world who, though he stood universally condemned and execrated, would have shed the last drop of her blood in his defense and vindication--in the same light as he viewed those who were as ready to spurn him in the day of his prosperity as in the day of his downfall, should such a day ever dawn upon him.