orrectness of the
attitude he assumed. Perhaps it would be fair to say that the Artistic
Stoic was the ideal towards which he strove. But, somehow, those
emotions would not sort themselves. There they all were--fury,
indignation, contempt, wounded pride, resignation, pity--there were no
more to be added or subtracted; each had its place and its object, yet
they would not coalesce. Now fury against his uncle, now pity for
himself, now a poisonous kind of contempt of Jenny. Or, again, a
primitive kind of longing for Jenny, a disregard of his uncle, an
abasement of himself. The emotions whirled and twisted, and he sat quite
still, with his eyes closed, watching them.

But there was one more emotion which had made its appearance entirely
unexpectedly as soon as he had heard the news, that now, greatly to his
surprise, was beginning to take a considerable place amongst the
rest--and this was an extraordinarily warm sense of affection towards
Frank--of all people. It was composed partly of compassion, and partly
of an inexplicable sort of respect for which he could perceive no
reason. It was curious, he thought later, why this one figure should
have pushed its way to the front just now, when his uncle and Jenny and,
secondarily, that Rector ("so visibly affected by the ceremony") should
have occupied all the field. Frank had never meant very much to Dick; he
had stood for the undignified and the boyish in the midst of those
other stately elements of which Merefield, and, indeed, all truly
admirable life, was composed.

Yet now this figure stood out before him with startling distinctness.

First there was the fact that both Frank and himself had suffered
cruelly at the hands of the same woman, though Frank incomparably the
more cruelly of the two. Dick had the honesty to confess that Jenny had
at least never actually broken faith with himself; but he had also the
perspicuity to see that it came to very nearly the same thing. He knew
with the kind of certitude that neither needs nor appeals to evidence
that Jenny would certainly have accepted him if it had not been that
Lord Talgarth had already dawned on her horizon, and that she put him
off for a while simply to see whether this elderly sun would rise yet
higher in the heavens. It was the same consideration, no doubt, that had
caused her to throw Frank over a month or two earlier. A Lord Talgarth
in the bush was worth two cadets in the hand. That was where her
sensibleness