But it was not a bad sort of pride, after all. It was not the foolish pride of the Oswalds generally, who deemed everybody beneath them; it was rather that pride of innate rectitude which keeps its owner from doing a mean, a wrong, or a disgraceful action. It was the pride of self-esteem, of self-reliance; that feeling which says: "I must not do so and so, for I should disgrace myself--those careless-living men around me may do these things, but I am superior to it" Other young men might plunge into the world's follies; pride, if no better motive, kept Oswald Cray from them. He could not for very shame have borne a tainted conscience; he could not have shown a clear outside to the world, open and fearless, knowing that his heart was foul within.
He was not proud of his family descent from the Oswalds. Quite the contrary. He found no cause to pride himself on either the Oswalds or the Crays. So far as the Oswalds went, many a hundred times had he wished they were no connections of his. All his life he had received from them nothing but slights; and slights to a man of Oswald Cray's temperament bring the deepest mortification. He knew now how they had treated his mother; he felt to his very heart how they despised himself. If he could have changed his dead grandfather into somebody else, a little less foolish and a great deal less grand, he had been better pleased.
But this very isolation from his mother's family had tended to foster his own pride--the mortification which it induced had fostered it--just as the isolation from his own home, from his father and the second family, had contributed to render him self-reliant. It is not your home darling, bred up in fond dependence, sheltered from the world's storms as a hothouse flower, who becomes the self-reliant man, but he who is sent out early to rough it, who has nobody to care for him, or to love him, in all the wide earth.
Not a more self-reliant man lived than Oswald Cray. He was sure, under God, of _himself_, of his good conduct; and I think it is about the best surety that a man or woman can carry with them through life. In moments of doubt, perplexity, difficulty, whatever might be its nature, he turned to his own heart and took its counsel--and it never failed him. It was with himself he deliberated; it was his own good judgment, his right feeling, that he called to his aid. He had an honest, upright nature, was strictly honourable; a proud man, if it is the proper sort of pride, nearly always is so. His ambition was great, but not extravagant; it did not soar him aloft in flights of fancy, vain, generally speaking, as they are absurd. He was determined to rise to the summit of his profession--that of a civil engineer--but he entertained no foolish dreams beyond it. To attain to that, he would use every diligence, every effort, consistent with uprightness and honour; and dishonourable efforts Oswald Cray would have scorned to use, would have shaken them from him as he shook a summer-day's dust from his shoes.