He was sure that at the first the good had been the strongest.

Little by little the brute had grown, and he, pleasure-loving, adapting himself to every change of environment, luxurious, self-indulgent, shrinking with the shrinking of a sensuous artist-nature from all that was irksome and disagreeable, had shut his ears to the voices that shouted warnings of the danger, and had allowed the brute to thrive and to grow, its abominable famine gorged from the store of that in him which he felt to be the purest, the cleanest, and the best, its bulk fattened upon the rot and the decay of all that was good, growing larger day by day, noisome, swollen, poddy, a filthy inordinate ghoul, gorged and bloated by feeding on the good things that were dead.
Besides this he saw how one by one he had wrenched himself free from all those influences that had tended to foster and to cultivate all the better part of him.
First of all, long ago it seemed now, he had allowed to be destroyed that first instinctive purity, that fragile, delicate innocence which dies young in almost every human being, and that one sees evaporating under the earliest taint of vice with a smile partly of contempt, partly of pity, partly of genuine regret.
Next it had been his father.

The Old Gentleman had exerted a great influence over Vandover; he had never forgotten that scene the morning after he had told him of his measure of responsibility in Ida Wade's suicide, the recovery from the first shock of dazed bewilderment and then the forgiveness, the solicitude and the encouragement to begin over again, to live it down and to do that which was right and good and true.
Not only had he stopped his ears to this voice, but also, something told him, he had done much to silence it forever.

Despite the Old Gentleman's apparent fortitude the blow must have carried home.

What must he not have suffered during those long weeks while Vandover was away, what lonely broodings in the empty house; and then the news of the wreck, the days of suspense! It all must have told; the Old Gentleman was not strong; Vandover could not but feel that he had hastened his death, and that in so doing he had destroyed another influence which would have cultivated and fostered his better self, would have made it strong against the attacks of the brute.
The other person who had helped to bring out all that was best in Vandover had been Turner Ravis.