Arthur was too inexperienced for this; for, like all young men, he also supposed that all these characters were conventional fictions of the stage. He did not believe in villains. Perhaps it would repay us to formulate Arthur’s views, as those of a respectable young New Englander of good education and bringing-up, with whose fortunes in life our book is largely concerned. Roughly expressed, they might be put in canons, much as follows: I. The world is in the main desirous of realizing the greatest good of the greatest number. II. Unfortunate necessities--the primal curse of labor, or what not--occupy the greater part of the time of the greater number with sustaining life; so the leisure of the fortunate few is doubly pledged to the discovery and attainment of the object before mentioned. III. Money is a regrettable necessity; but its acquirement, even from the selfish point of view, is but a means to an end. That end, where personal, is the enjoyment of the pleasures of life--_i.e._, literature, art, refined society, travel, and health. The larger end is intelligent charity, or public work. IV. Vice exists, like vermin, as a repulsive vulgarity. V. Crime exists pathologically--_i.e._, it is either an abnormal disease, or the consequence of a pitiable weakness. VI. Honesty is the first virtue of the greater number; honor, which is honesty with a flower added, is the peculiar virtue of a gentleman. VII. Gentlemen are honorable and brave; ladies are like Shelley’s heroines, or the ladies in the Idylls of the King. VIII. The chiefest quality of humanity is love; and the object of all human endeavor is to observe and avail itself of the love of that being which is not humanity. So much for his ethics; and, as we have said Arthur was a poet, it may not come amiss to add an approximation of his theory of æsthetics. This was, in brief: IX. All beauty is the visible evidence of the love of God; nature is a divine manifestation; and literature, art, and music are the language in which humanity may reply. Thus, in particular, all highest poetry is but this--the discovery of the love of God. Such were his tenets, the standard of Arthur’s exalted moments, as he supposed them then to be of others. In trying to live by them, he knew that he was weak, as all men are. Of all the people whom he knew, Gracie Holyoke alone seemed always to observe them. So it may well be that Arthur did not, on that night, justly estimate the worth of those about him. He had, simply, a very enjoyable dinner; he was innocently pleased with the glitter of the glass, the sparkle of the diamonds, the richness of the china, the beauty of the women, the finish of their talk; it was a venial sin for him to like the food and wines,--but there was perhaps one other ingredient in his pleasure, the subtilest of all, which escaped him. Leaving this, for his account, let us speak of the others.