rank and
possession. They had no glamour for him; he realized their burdens,
their ineffectiveness for all the more precious kinds of happiness--how
could he not, with these two forlorn figures of Chudleigh and his boy
always before him? As for imagination and poetry, Delafield, with a
mind that was either positive or mystical--the mind, one might say, of
the land-agent or the saint--failed to see where they came in. Family
tradition, no doubt, carries a thrill. But what thrill is there in the
mere possession of a vast number of acres of land, of more houses, new
and old, than any human being can possibly live in, of more money than
any reasonable man can ever spend, and more responsibilities than he can
ever meet? Such things often seemed to Delafield pure calamity--mere
burdens upon life and breath. That he could and must be forced, some
time, by law and custom, to take them up, was nothing but a social
barbarity.

Mingled with all which, of course, was his passionate sense of spiritual
democracy. To be throned apart, like a divine being, surrounded by the
bought homage of one's fellows, and possessed of more power than a man
can decently use, was a condition which excited in Delafield the same
kind of contemptuous revolt that it would have excited in St. Francis.
"Be not ye called master"--a Christian even of his transcendental and
heterodox sort, if he _were_ a Christian, must surely hold these words
in awe, at least so far as concerned any mastery of the external or
secular kind. To masteries of another order the saint has never been
disinclined.

As he once more struck the village street, this familiar whirl of
thoughts was buzzing in Delafield's mind, pierced, however, by one
sharper and newer. Julie! Did he know--had he ever dared to find
out--how she regarded this future which was overtaking them? She had
tried to sound _him_; she had never revealed herself.

In Lady Henry's house he had often noticed in Julie that she had an
imaginative tenderness for rank or great fortune. At first it had seemed
to him a woman's natural romanticism; then he explained it to himself as
closely connected with her efforts to serve Warkworth.

But suppose he were made to feel that there, after all, lay her
compensation? She had submitted to a loveless marriage and lost her
lover; but the dukedom was to make amends. He knew well that it would be
so with nine women out of ten. But the bare thought that it might be so
with Juli