when he went against the design of things

"He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings.  He felt now that his surroundings explained him.  Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it passively.  He had only to glance down at his dress coat to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him." (Cather, 484)

For me, this was perhaps the most engaging moment in "Paul's Case."  This taut, lucid passage conveys the complete character transformation that Paul greatly desired and worked toward.  He is no longer the young man driven by his tempered paranoia of being misunderstood by his father, teachers, and peers.  Paul does not have to work at building his own persona.  That is, he does not have to make explicit his views on his education, he does not have to boast his direct ties to high-brow culture (i.e., the theatre), and he does not have to improvise "explanations that [do not] explain" (473).  His efforts to set himself apart from those around him have finally paid off.  He has succeeded in recreating himself and takes a moment to bask in his achievement.  In this passage, Paul sits in the hotel in a state of artificial beauty and tenuous nirvana.  For a fleeting moment, he is untouchable.

And so, Paul's solitary bliss brings to mind the transformative role of class on the self.  Setting the above excerpt against Paul's eventual suicide, can a personal desire for social mobility lead to a "real," long-lasting transformation of the self, or is this desire the mark of a tragic hero?  In other words, does Cather's short story serve to glorify and/or disparage the idea of social mobility?