As the Governor had found him an uncertain quantity before, there were due precautions taken to keep him in the traces this time, by veiled threats of what would befall him if he kicked them over a second time. Crane understood perfectly well. He also realised that there were two men under his skin--one, honest and loving the truth, and the other, craving money and power and consideration, tormented with vanity, enslaved by self-love, a fierce and hideous object to contemplate. But he need not contemplate it; and with this determination he took a friendly cocktail with the Governor, and departed for Circleville. That hint about his wife opened Crane’s eyes to the necessity of the outward practice of virtue, and he then determined to compass, as far as in him lay, the whole comprehensive sin of hypocrisy. He would be very attentive to his wife and devoted to his children. He would go to church regularly. He would adopt a Cincinnatus-like mode of life, that out of his small means he might contribute to charity and have it known by the special correspondents. In short, he proposed to become that object of man’s hate and God’s wrath, a hypocrite. _Chapter Eleven_ IN THE SWEET-DO-NOTHING OF THE SUMMER-TIME Straightway, Crane began a hypocritical mode of life, and deceived everybody in the world except the two most necessary to deceive--himself and his wife. He did not deceive himself. There was enough of honesty in him to make him loathe himself, while doggedly carrying out the devil’s programme, into which he had entered with Governor Sanders. As he went to church on summer Sundays, with Annette by his side and the two children trotting soberly in front of them, Crane felt as if a bolt from heaven ought to descend upon him for his treachery to the man who had befriended him. Sitting in the cool, dim church, his head devoutly bowed as if in prayer, he doubted that there was a personal God; for if so, how could He tolerate such blasphemy us a man praying, to be seen of men; giving, to be published in the newspapers, and saying to his brother, “How is it with thee, my brother?” and then stabbing him in the back? At one thing, the evil spirit within him shuddered and turned away. This was when he had a very friendly letter from Senator Bicknell, saying he should be in the neighbourhood of Circleville in the next fortnight, and if convenient he would accept Crane’s often-urged invitation to stop and spend a day at his house.