Rollo went away with a great deal of offended dignity, holding himself stiffly erect, body and soul. He had never been so entirely disgusted, revolted, by the coarse character of the ideas and insinuations, which in themselves were not particularly novel, he was aware. It was because everything grew coarse under the touch of such a fellow as this, he said to himself; and it must be allowed that vice, stripped of all sentiment and adornment, was a disgusting spectacle. Rollo had never been a vicious man. He had taken it calmly in others, acknowledging that, if they liked it, he had no right to interfere; but he had not cared for it much himself--he was not a man of passions. A dilettante generally does avoid these coarser snares of humanity; and there had always been a sense of nausea in his mind when he was brought in contact with the vicious. But this nausea had been more physical than spiritual. It was not virtue but temperament which produced it; his own temptations were not in this kind. Nevertheless, he knew that to show any exaggerated feeling on the subject would only expose him to laughter, and he was not courageous enough either to blame warmly in others, or to decry strenuously in himself, the existence of unlawful bonds. What did it matter to anybody if he were virtuous? his neighbours were not on that account to be baulked of their cakes and ale; his disinclination towards sins of the grosser kind was not a thing he was proud of--it was a constitutional peculiarity, like inability to ascend heights or to go to sea without suffering. He was not at all sure that it was not a sign of weakness--a thing to be kept out of sight. Accordingly he took his part in the social gossip, which has no warmer interest than this, like everybody else, never pretended to any superiority, and took it for granted that now and then everybody “went wrong.” He would have been a monster if he had done anything else. Why, even his good aunt Caroline--the best and stupidest of women, to whom, if she had desired it, no opportunity of going wrong had ever presented itself--liked to hear these stories and believed them implicitly, and was convinced that not to go wrong was quite exceptional. Rollo was not the man to emancipate himself from such a complete and universal understanding. He allowed it calmly, and did not pretend either to disapprove or to doubt. Probably he had himself coldly, and as a matter of course, “gone wrong” too in his day, and certainly he had never given himself out as at all better than his neighbours. Was it only the coarseness of his vulgar associate which made the suggestion so deeply disgusting to him now?