--stamped his pedantic foot on
me--ever since we were boys together! I have owed him one for many
years--now I have paid it. Let him take the chances of war!"

Then, driven on by an irritation not to be quieted, he began against his
will to think of those various occasions on which he and Aldous Raeburn
had crossed each other in the past--of that incident in particular which
Miss Raeburn had roughly recalled to Lady Winterbourne's reluctant
memory.

Well, and what of it? It had occurred when Wharton was a lad of
twenty-one, and during an interval of some months when Aldous Raeburn,
who had left Cambridge some three years before, and was already the man
of importance, had shown a decided disposition to take up the brilliant,
unmanageable boy, whom the Levens, among other relations, had already
washed their hands of.

"What did he do it for?" thought Wharton. "Philanthropic motives of
course. He is one of the men who must always be saving their souls, and
the black sheep of the world come in handy for the purpose. I remember I
was flattered then. It takes one some time to understand the workings of
the Hebraistic conscience!"

Yes--as it galled him to recollect--he had shown great plasticity for a
time. He was then in the middle of his Oxford years, and Raeburn's
letters and Raeburn's influence had certainly pulled him through various
scrapes that might have been disastrous. Then--a little later--he could
see the shooting lodge on the moors above Loch Etive, where he and
Raeburn, Lord Maxwell, Miss Raeburn, and a small party had spent the
August of his twenty-first birthday. Well--that surly keeper, and his
pretty wife who had been Miss Raeburn's maid--could anything be more
inevitable? A hard and jealous husband, and one of the softest, most
sensuous natures that ever idleness made love to. The thing was in the
air!--in the summer, in the blood--as little to be resisted as the
impulse to eat when you are hungry, or drink when you thirst. Besides,
what particular harm had been done, what particular harm _could_ have
been done with such a Cerberus of a husband? As to the outcry which had
followed one special incident, nothing could have been more uncalled
for, more superfluous. Aldous had demanded contrition, had said strong
things with the flashing eyes, the set mouth of a Cato. And the culprit
had turned obstinate--would repent nothing--not for the asking.
Everything was arguable, and Renan's doubt as to whether he o