midnight
He had been respectable ever since he was born ; if he was born with any instinct it was the instinct of respectability , the wish to be honored for what he seemed . It was all the stronger in him , because his father had never had it ; perhaps an hereditary trait found expression in him after passing over one generation ; perhaps an antenatal influence formed him to that type . His mother was always striving to keep the man she had married worthy of her choice in the eyes of her neighbors ; but he had never seconded her efforts . He had been educated a doctor , but never practised medicine ; in carrying on the drug and book business of the village , he cared much more for the literary than the pharmaceutical side of it ; he liked to have a circle of cronies about the wood-stove in his store till midnight , and discuss morals and religion with them ; and one night , when denying the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures , he went to the wrong jar for an ingredient of the prescription he was making up ; the patient died of his mistake . The disgrace and the disaster broke his wife 's heart ; but he lived on to a vague and colorless old age , supported by his son in a total disoccupation . The elder Northwick used sometimes to speak of his son and his success in the world ; not boastfully , but with a certain sarcasm for the source of his bounty , as a boy who had always disappointed him by a narrowness of ambition . He called him Milt , and he said he supposed now Milt was the most self-satisfied man in Massachusetts ; he implied that there were better things than material success .