Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

Something Right Somewhere

To be in the halting state of Mr Henry Gowan; to have left one of
two powers in disgust; to want the necessary qualifications for
finding promotion with another, and to be loitering moodily about
on neutral ground, cursing both; is to be in a situation
unwholesome for the mind, which time is not likely to improve. The
worst class of sum worked in the every-day world is cyphered by the
diseased arithmeticians who are always in the rule of Subtraction
as to the merits and successes of others, and never in Addition as
to their own.

The habit, too, of seeking some sort of recompense in the
discontented boast of being disappointed, is a habit fraught with
degeneracy. A certain idle carelessness and recklessness of
consistency soon comes of it. To bring deserving things down by
setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and
there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game,
without growing the worse for it.

In his expressed opinions of all performances in the Art of
painting that were completely destitute of merit, Gowan was the
most liberal fellow on earth. He would declare such a man to have
more power in his little finger (provided he had none), than such
another had (provided he had much) in his whole mind and body. If
the objection were taken that the thing commended was trash, he
would reply, on behalf of his art, 'My good fellow, what do we all
turn out but trash? I turn out nothing else, and I make you a
present of the confession.'

To make a vaunt of being poor was another of the incidents of his
splenetic state, though this may have had the design in it of
showing that he ought to be rich; just as he would publicly laud
and decry the Barnacles, lest it should be forgotten that he
belonged to the family. Howbeit, these two subjects were very
often on his lips; and he managed them so well that he might have
praised himself by the month together, and not have made himself
out half so important a man as he did by his light disparagement of
his claims on anybody's consideration.

Out of this same airy talk of his, it always soon came to be
understood, wherever he and his wife went, that he had married
against the wishes of his exalted relations, and had had much ado
to prevail on them to countenance her. He never made the
representation, on the contrary seemed to laugh the idea to scorn;
but it did happen that, with all his pains to depreciate himself,
he was always in the superior position. From the days of their
honeymoon, Minnie Gowan felt sensible of being usually regarded as
the wife of a man who had made a descent in marrying her, but whose
chivalrous love for her had cancelled