"You'd better wait a little while," said the doctor. "Stop, and have some breakfast with me."
And then Arthur's self-control broke. He leant against the library shelves, covering his face with his hands.
"O my father," he cried, "how could you do it?"
"Don't take it too hardly," said the doctor. "Perhaps he didn't know ... surely he didn't think."
"Yes, he knew," said Arthur, turning on the doctor a pair of flaming, tear-wet eyes. "He's done it before. He once put oyster-shells and road-gravel into the foundations of a church instead of concrete. I heard him say so. He must have done it many times. And he doesn't care. People die, and he doesn't care. And I'm his son ... the son of a man who is a scoundrel."
He pushed the astonished doctor aside, and somehow found his way into the open air. There lay the world, even as he had left it, but its aspect was wholly changed. In the fresh morning light it had smiled upon him, it had seemed honest, it had breathed security of joy; now the mask of hypocrisy was gone, and it was an old, evil, wrinkled face that leered at him. It was the stage of tragic passions, it was full of the habitations of cruelty.
"Splashed with blood of the poor"—so he saw the world at that moment, a red grotesque, a grim crimson horror. And he saw his father, too, clothed in the same blood-red livery of crime.