devoted the remainder to various public institutions and local charities.  Rowland’s third was an easy competence, and he never felt a moment’s jealousy of his fellow-pensioners; but when one of the establishments which had figured most advantageously in his father’s will bethought itself to affirm the existence of a later instrument, in which it had been still more handsomely treated, the young man felt a sudden passionate need to repel the claim by process of law.  There was a lively tussle, but he gained his case; immediately after which he made, in another quarter, a donation of the contested sum.  He cared nothing for the money, but he had felt an angry desire to protest against a destiny which seemed determined to be exclusively salutary.  It seemed to him that he would bear a little spoiling.  And yet he treated himself to a very modest quantity, and submitted without reserve to the great national discipline which began in 1861.  When the Civil War broke out he immediately obtained a commission, and did his duty for three long years as a citizen soldier.  His duty was obscure, but he never lost a certain private satisfaction in remembering that on two or three occasions it had been performed with something of an ideal precision.  He had disentangled himself from business, and after the war he felt a profound disinclination to tie the knot again.  He had no desire to make money, he had money enough; and although he knew, and was frequently reminded, that a young man is the better for a fixed occupation, he could discover no moral advantage in driving a lucrative trade.  Yet few young men of means and leisure ever made less of a parade of idleness, and indeed idleness in any degree could hardly be laid at the door of a young man who took life in the serious, attentive, reasoning fashion of our friend.  It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked the prime requisite of a graceful flaneur—­the simple, sensuous, confident relish of pleasure.  He had frequent fits of extreme melancholy, in which he declared that he was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring.  He was neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical one, and he was forever looking in vain for the uses of the things that please and the charm of the things that sustain.  He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist.  It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.  Oftenest, perhaps, he wished he were a vigorous young man of genius, without a penny.  As it was, he could only buy pictures, and not paint them; and in the way of action, he had to content himself with making a rule to render scrupulous moral justice to handsome examples of it in others.  On the whole, he had an incorruptible modesty.  With his blooming complexion and his serene gray eye, he felt the friction of existence more than was suspected; but he asked no allowance on grounds of temper, he assumed that fate had treated him inordinately well and that he had no excuse for taking an ill-natured view of life, and he undertook constantly to believe that all women were fair, all men were brave, and the world was a delightful place of sojourn, until the contrary had been distinctly proved.