"All standards are arbitrary," he was accustomed to say, "and all terms are relative. Every man must make his own ethical code, and nobody but the man himself can tell how far he lives up to it. Why should I care whether people who do not even know what my rules of conduct are, consider my course correct or not? Very likely the things they condemn are the things it has cost me most struggle and self-denial to achieve. We have outgrown old ethical systems, because the world has become enlightened enough to perceive that every mind must make its own code; to realize that what a man is must be his religion." This course of reasoning was one shared by many of Fenton's friends, and indeed by a goodly company of nineteenth century thinkers. Fenton was in reality only going with the majority of liberalists in regarding sincerity to personal conviction as the highest of ethical laws; and he was generally pretty logical in choosing the approval of his inward knowledge to that of the world outside. Yet his vanity was keenly sensitive to disapprobation, and when the censure of the world coincided with the condemnation of his own reason he suffered. To self-contempt was added a baffled sense of having been discovered; and as his imagination now ran forward to picture the effects of Irons's disclosure, the suffering he endured was really pitiful. "Nobody will understand," he said to himself one day, half in bitter self-contempt and half in self-defence, "that I couldn't help doing as I did; no cruelty surpasses that of holding weak and sensitive natures accountable for shortcomings they are born incapable of avoiding." And having accomplished an epigram at his own expense, he felt as if he had to some degree atoned for his fault, just as a flagellant looks upon his self-scourging as expiatory. How to act in the position in which he had been placed by Irons's insulting proposal was a question which he found more difficult to answer than according to his theories, it should have been. When a man becomes his own highest law he is constantly exposed to the danger of finding his theories of conduct utterly confounded by a change in self-interest; and Fenton began to have a most painful sense of being ethically wholly at sea. He had not yielded to temptation, however. He had given Stewart Hubbard a couple of sittings, and so great had been his fear lest he should inadvertently gather from his sitter some hint of the knowledge he had been urged to obtain, that he had half unconsciously been reserved and silent. The picture was going badly, and the sitter wondered what had come over the witty and vivacious artist.