Yet it was neither; and the feeling had, in truth, its own logic and history.  He had lived from his youth up among the pageants of rank and possession.  They had no glamour for him; he realized their burdens, their ineffectiveness for all the more precious kinds of happiness—­how could he not, with these two forlorn figures of Chudleigh and his boy always before him?  As for imagination and poetry, Delafield, with a mind that was either positive or mystical—­the mind, one might say, of the land-agent or the saint—­failed to see where they came in.  Family tradition, no doubt, carries a thrill.  But what thrill is there in the mere possession of a vast number of acres of land, of more houses, new and old, than any human being can possibly live in, of more money than any reasonable man can ever spend, and more responsibilities than he can ever meet?  Such things often seemed to Delafield pure calamity—­mere burdens upon life and breath.  That he could and must be forced, some time, by law and custom, to take them up, was nothing but a social barbarity.

Mingled with all which, of course, was his passionate sense of spiritual democracy.  To be throned apart, like a divine being, surrounded by the bought homage of one’s fellows, and possessed of more power than a man can decently use, was a condition which excited in Delafield the same kind of contemptuous revolt that it would have excited in St. Francis.  “Be not ye called master”—­a Christian even of his transcendental and heterodox sort, if he were a Christian, must surely hold these words in awe, at least so far as concerned any mastery of the external or secular kind.  To masteries of another order the saint has never been disinclined.

As he once more struck the village street, this familiar whirl of thoughts was buzzing in Delafield’s mind, pierced, however, by one sharper and newer.  Julie!  Did he know—­had he ever dared to find out—­how she regarded this future which was overtaking them?  She had tried to sound him; she had never revealed herself.

In Lady Henry’s house he had often noticed in Julie that she had an imaginative tenderness for rank or great fortune.  At first it had seemed to him a woman’s natural romanticism; then he explained it to himself as closely connected with her efforts to serve Warkworth.

But suppose he were made to feel that there, after all, lay her compensation?  She had submitted to a loveless marriage and lost her lover; but the dukedom was to make amends.  He knew well that it would be so with nine women out of ten.  But the bare thought that it might be so with Julie maddened him.  He then was to be for her, in the future, the mere symbol of the vulgarer pleasures and opportunities, while Warkworth held her heart?

Nay!

He stood still, strengthening in himself the glad and sufficient answer.  She had refused him twice—­knowing all his circumstances.  At this moment he adored her doubly for those old rebuffs.