As he dressed he had much less than his wonted content with himself.

He did not take the same satisfaction in his clothes, as evidence of his good taste, or in his admired variations of the fashion of wearing the hair and tying the scarf.

Midway in the process of arranging his hair he put down his military brushes; leaning against the dressing table, he fixed his mind upon the first serious thoughts he had ever had in his whole irresponsible, sheltered life.

"Well," he said, half-aloud, "there _is_ something wrong! If there isn't, why do I feel as if my spine had collapsed ?" After a long pause, he added: "And it has! All that held it steady was father's hand." The whole lofty and beautiful structure of self-complacence upon which he had lounged, preening his feathers and receiving social triumphs and the adulation of his "less fortunate fellows" as the due of his own personal superiority, suddenly slipped from under him.

With a rueful smile at his plight, he said: "The governor has called me down." Then, resentfully, and with a return of his mood of dignity outraged and pride trampled upon: "But he had no right to put me up there--or let me climb up there." Once a wrong becomes "vested," it is a "vested right," sacred, taboo.