“Damn the fellow!” said Tom to me.  “I can’t help liking him.”

“Nor I, either,” was my reply; but I also damned him in my turn.

CHAPTER X.

A Fine Project.

Were it my own history that I am here undertaking, I should give at this place an account of my first duel, which was fought with swords, in Bayard’s Woods, my opponent being an English lieutenant of foot, from whom I had suffered a display of that superciliousness which our provincial troops had so resented in the British regulars in the old French War.  By good luck I disarmed the man without our receiving more than a small scratch apiece; and subsequently brought him to the humbleness of a fawning spaniel, by a mien and tone of half-threatening superiority which never fail of reducing such high-talking sparks to abject meekness.  ’Twas a trick of pretended bullying, which we long-suffering Americans were driven to adopt in self-defence against certain derisive, contemptuous praters that came to our shores from Europe.  But ’tis more to my purpose, as the biographer of Philip Winwood, to continue upon the subject of Captain Falconer.

He was the mirror of elegance, with none of the exaggerations of a fop.  He brought with him to the Queen Street house the atmosphere of Bond Street and Pall Mall, the perfume of Almack’s and the assembly rooms, the air of White’s and the clubs, the odour of the chocolate houses and the fashionable taverns.  ’Twas all that he represented, I fancy, rather than what the man himself was, and conquering as he was, that caught Margaret’s eye.  He typified the world before which she had hoped to shine, and from which she had been debarred—­cruelly debarred, it may have seemed to her.  I did not see this then; ’twas another, one of a broader way of viewing things, one of a less partial imagination—­’twas Philip Winwood—­that found this excuse for her.

Captain Falconer had the perception soon to gauge correctly us who were of American rearing, and the tact to cast aside the lofty manner by which so many of his stupid comrades estranged us.  He treated Tom and me with an easy but always courteous familiarity that surprised, flattered, and won us.  He would play cards with us, in his sitting-room, as if rather for the sake of our company than for the pleasure of the game.  Indeed, as he often frankly confessed, gambling was no passion with him; and this was remarkable at a time when ’twas the only passion most fine young gentlemen would acknowledge as genuine in them, and when those who did not feel that passion affected it.  We admired this fine disdain on his part for the common fashionable occupation of the age (for the pursuit of women was pretended to be followed as a necessary pastime, but without much real heart) as evidence of a superior mind.  Yet he played with us, losing at first, but eventually winning until I had to withdraw.  Tom, having more money to lose, held out longer.