Her indifference to all which fascinated and awed himself compelled his reluctant respect, and the serene hauteur of her habitual manner made him feel awkward and insignificant in her presence. He was in some respects, when he pitted himself against her, compelled unwillingly to acknowledge that she was the stronger of the two. She had hurt him enough by the mere accident of her sex. He never forgave her that she had lived whilst her brothers had died. He had no affection for her, and only a sullen unwilling respect, which was rung out of him by seeing her ease in that world where he was uneasy and her familiarity with those great persons before whom he was always himself dumb and frightened and distressed. So far, at least, the money spent on her had not been wasted, it had made her one of them. For this he held her in respect, but she could not move him a hair’s breadth from his ambitions or his methods of pursuing them. These methods were to her more refined taste and more penetrating vision absurd and odious. She knew that the great world would use him, rook him, feed on him, but would always laugh at him and never see in him anything except a snob. She knew that every invitation given to him or accepted from him, every house-party which he was allowed to gather, or allowed to join, every good club which he was put up for, every great man who consented to dine with him, were all paid for by him at enormous cost, indirectly indeed but none the less extravagantly. She knew that he would in all likelihood live to do all he had aspired to do; to get into the Commons, perhaps to get into the Cabinet, to receive royalty, to shake hands with princes of the blood, even perhaps to die a peer. But she knew that all this would be done by purchase, by giving money, by lending money, by spending money largely and asking no questions, by doing for the impoverished great what Madame de Sevigné called manuring the ground. To her taste, success and rank procured in such a manner left you precisely where you were before its purchase. She knew that to a society which you only enter on sufferance you remain always practically outside on the door-mat; and she did not understand that to the soul of the snob even the dust of the door-mat is sweet. She did not understand either that in her father’s case the door-mat was but one of the preliminary stages of the triumphant career which he had mapped out in his brain when he had first put _one dollar on another_ in Dakota.