Campbell, like other men, had his faults: and his were those of a man wrapped up in a pure and stately, but an austere and lonely creed, distrusted with the world in all its forms, and looking down upon men in general nearly as much as Thurnall did. So he set down Elsley for a bad man, to whom he was forced by hard circumstances to behave as if he were a good one.
The only way, therefore, in which he could vent his feeling, was by showing to Lucia that studied attention which sympathy and chivalry demand of a man toward an injured woman. Not that he dared, or wished, to conduct himself with her as he did with Valencia, even had she not been a married woman; he did not know her as intimately as he did her sister; but still he had a right to behave as the most intimate friend of her family, and he asserted that right; and all the more determinedly because Elsley seemed now and then not to like it. "I will teach him how to behave to a charming woman," said he to himself; and perhaps he had been wiser if he had not said it: but every man has his weak point, and chivalry was Major Campbell's.
"What do you think of that poet, Mellot?" said he once, on returning from a pic-nic, during which Elsley had never noticed his wife; and, at last, finding Valencia engaged with Headley, had actually gone off, pour pis aller, to watch Lord Scoutbush fishing.
"Oh, clever enough, and to spare; and as well read a man as I know. One of the Sturm-und-drang party, of course:—the express locomotive school, scream-and-go-head: and thinks me, with my classicism, a benighted pagan. Still, every man has a right to his opinion. Live and let live."
"I don't care about his taste," said the Major impatiently. "What sort of man is he?—man, Claude?"
"Ahem, humph! 'Irritabile genus poetarum.' But one is so accustomed to that among literary men, one never expects them to be like anybody else, and so takes their whims and oddities for granted."
"And their sins too, eh?"
"Sins? I know of none on his part."
"Don't you call temper a sin?"
"No; I call it a determination of blood to the head, or of animal spirits to the wrong place, or—my dear Major, I am no moralist. I take people, you know, as I find them. But he is a bore; and I should not wonder if that sweet little woman had found it out ere now."