He had remembered every word
of cold discouragement to which he had been forced to listen at the very
beginning, and he had felt sure of having a success to set against each
one of those words. He knew that he had not been idle and he had fancied
that every hour of work had produced its permanent result, and left him
with something more to show. He had seen his mother's pride in him
growing day by day in his apparent success, and he had been confident of
proving to her that she was not half proud enough. All that was gone in
a moment. He saw, or fancied that he saw, nothing but a series of
failures which had been bolstered up and inflated into seeming triumphs
by a man whom his father despised and hated and whom, as a man, he
himself did not respect. The disillusionment was complete.
At first it seemed to him that there was nothing to be done but to go
directly to Saracinesca and tell the truth to his father and mother.
Financially, when the wealth of the family was taken into consideration
there was nothing very alarming in the situation.
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