In time they became truly enormous.
Aleck built a university or two per Sunday; also a hospital or two;
also a Rowton hotel or so; also a batch of churches; now and then
a cathedral; and once, with untimely and ill-chosen playfulness,
Sally said, "It was a cold day when she didn't ship a cargo of
missionaries to persuade unreflecting Chinamen to trade off twenty-four
carat Confucianism for counterfeit Christianity."
This rude and unfeeling language hurt Aleck to the heart, and she
went from the presence crying. That spectacle went to his own heart,
and in his pain and shame he would have given worlds to have
those unkind words back. She had uttered no syllable of reproach
--and that cut him. Not one suggestion that he look at his own record
--and she could have made, oh, so many, and such blistering ones!
Her generous silence brought a swift revenge, for it turned his
thoughts upon himself, it summoned before him a spectral procession,
a moving vision of his life as he had been leading it these past
few years of limitless prosperity, and as he sat there reviewing
it his cheeks burned and his soul was steeped in humiliation.
Look at her life--how fair it was, and tending ever upward; and look
at his own--how frivolous, how charged with mean vanities, how selfish,
how empty, how ignoble! And its trend--never upward, but downward,
ever downward!
He instituted comparisons between her record and his own.
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