considering, and caring for what was
before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. His outlook
upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that
projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which
makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word
for circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was
yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, the day after.

On this account he might, in certain lights, have been regarded as
one of the most fortunate of his order. For it may be argued with
great plausibility that reminiscence is less an endowment than a
disease, and that expectation in its only comfortable form--that of
absolute faith--is practically an impossibility; whilst in the form
of hope and the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve,
curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.

Sergeant Troy, being entirely innocent of the practice of
expectation, was never disappointed. To set against this negative
gain there may have been some positive losses from a certain
narrowing of the higher tastes and sensations which it entailed. But
limitation of the capacity is never recognized as a loss by the loser
therefrom: in this attribute moral or aesthetic poverty contrasts
plausibly with material, since those who suffer do not mind it,
whilst those who mind it soon cease to suffer. It is not a denial
of anything to have been always without it, and what Troy had never
enjoyed he did not miss; but, being fully conscious that what sober
people missed he enjoyed, his capacity, though really less, seemed
greater than theirs.

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like
a Cretan--a system of ethics above all others calculated to win
popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society; and
the possibility of the favour gained being transitory had reference
only to the future.

He never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the
ugly; and hence, though his morals had hardly been applauded,
disapproval of them had frequently been tempered with a smile. This
treatment had led to his becoming a sort of regrater of other men's
gallantries, to his own aggrandizement as a Corinthian, rather than
to the moral profit of his hearers.

His reason and his propensities had seldom any reciprocating
influence, having separated by mutual consent long ago: thence it
sometimes happened that, while his i