Family aggrandizement and political ambition are not the loftiest motives of a man's life, but still they lift money-making a little above the dirty drudgery of mere accumulation.

Hitherto Crawford had worked for an object, and the object, at least in his own eyes, had dignified the labor.
In his secret heart he was angry at Colin's calm respectability.

A spendthrift prodigal, wasting his substance in riotous living, would have been easier to manage than this young man of aesthetic tastes, whose greatest extravagance was a statuette or a picture.

Tallisker, too, was more uneasy than he would confess.

He had hoped that Colin would answer his father's summons, because he believed now that the life he was leading was unmanning him.