on's point of view.

Meanwhile Frank was winning the confidence of his own child, who,
however, ranked Richard higher always, and became to a degree his
father's tyrant. But Frank's nature was undergoing a change. His point
of view also had enlarged. The suffering, bitterness, and humiliation
of his life in the North had done him good. He was being disciplined
to take his position as a husband and father, but he sometimes grew
heavy-hearted when he saw how his attentions oppressed his wife, and had
it not been for Richard he might probably have brought on disaster, for
the position was trying to all concerned. A few days before the wedding
Edward Lambert and his wife arrived, and he, Captain Vidall, and Frank
Armour took rides and walks together, or set the world right in the
billiard-room. Richard seldom joined them, though their efforts to
induce him to do so were many. He had his pensioners, his books, his
pipe, and "the boy," and he had returned in all respects, in so far as
could be seen, to his old life, save for the new and larger interest of
his nephew.

One evening the three men with General Armour were all gathered in the
billiard-room. Conversation had been general and without particular
force, as it always is when merely civic or political matters are under
view. But some one gave a social twist to the talk, and presently they
were launched upon that sea where every man provides his own chart, or
he is a very worm and no man. Each man had been differently trained,
each viewed life from a different stand-point, and yet each had been
brought up in the same social atmosphere, in the same social sets, had
imbibed the same traditions, been moved generally by the same public
considerations.

"But there's little to be said for a man who doesn't, outwardly at
least, live up to the social necessity," said Lambert.

"And keep the Ten Commandments in the vulgar tongue," rejoined Vidall.

"I've lived seventy-odd years, and I've knocked about a good deal in
my time," said the general, "but I've never found that you could make
a breach of social necessity, as you call it, without paying for it one
way or another. The trouble with us when we're young is that we want to
get more out of life than there really is in it. There is not much in
it, after all. You can stand just so much fighting, just so much work,
just so much emotion--and you can stand less emotion than anything else.
I'm sure more men and women break up fr