The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth--by sheer weight of merit alone.

On that view he considered himself entitled to undisputed success.

His father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect--a man supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness.
In the son, individualist by temperament, once the science of colleges had replaced thoroughly the faith of conventicles, this moral attitude translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition.

He nursed it as something secularly holy.

To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous.