CHAPTER XI
THE QUEEN IS DEAD—LONG LIVE THE QUEEN
All that week at the mill, Richard Travis had been making preparations for his trip to Boston. Regularly twice, and often three times a year, he had made the same journey, where his report to the directors was received and discussed. After that, there were always two weeks of theatres, operas, wine-suppers and dissipations of other kinds—though never of the grossest sort—for even in sin there is refinement, and Richard Travis was by instinct and inheritance refined.
He was not conscious—and who of his class ever are?—of the effects of the life he was leading—the tightening of this chain of immoral habits, the searing of what conscience he had, the freezing of all that was generous and good within him.
Once his nature had been as a lake in midsummer, its surface shimmering in the sunlight, reflecting something of the beauty that came to it. Now, cold, sordid, callous, it lay incased in winter ice and neither could the sunlight go in nor its reflection go out. It slept on in coarse opaqueness, covered with an impenetrable crust which he himself did not understand.
“But,” said the old Bishop more than once, “God can touch him and he will thaw like a spring day. There is somethin' great in Richard Travis if he can only be touched.”
But vice cannot reason. Immorality cannot deduce. Only the moral ponders deeply and knows both the premises and the conclusions, because only the moral thinks.