Sir Willoughby is only an egoist, not a hypocrite nor a sycophant; and being a gentleman can suffer naught but a gentlemanly humiliation. Such a one is not to be knocked down and taunted in the presence of his little world; he is merely made a subject of gossip and speculation: nor is he to be reduced to sordid material scheming; his intrigues are all on the spiritual plane. A destiny that seemed kind but proved cruel created him the central sun to his own solar system. His only sin was the desire to maintain that position by exerting a strong but legitimate centripetal force upon his satellites: if any centrifugal force should become stronger, they must simply drop off into space. His mate he conceived of as the fairest star of all, gladly answering an imperious summons to disregard even the laws of gravitation, to surrender even the personality of a satellite, to rush headlong to a union that secured enlargement of the sun by the quenching and absorption of the star. And for this, his only punishment was the refusal, incredible, presumptuous, on the part of a succession of chosen stars to surrender, to rush, to be absorbed. His utmost penalty was the decree that he must be content with the indifferent attendance of a weary moon whose own light had grown cold and who avowed an allegiance at the most, dutiful, quite disillusioned, and granted because of a pressure that amounted to compulsion. Externally his situation is prosperous and respectable. He remains an aristocrat of wealth and station, “the humour of whom,” as his own author says,[141] “scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him,” and whose figure therefore never becomes palpably absurd. Only by the “detective vision” of the imps is he seen poised on the pinnacle of absurdity, while the Pecksniffs and Becky Sharps of the world cluster around its base.