Everard’s involuntary break-down from his veteran’s roughness to a touch of feeling thrilled Nevil, who began to perceive what his uncle was driving at when he rebuked the coxcombry of the field, and spoke of the description of compliment your hero was paying Englishmen in affecting to give them examples of bravery and preternatural coolness.  Nevil sent home humble confessions of guilt in this respect, with fresh praises of young Michell:  for though Everard, as Nevil recognized it, was perfectly right in the abstract, and generally right, there are times when an example is needed by brave men—­times when the fiery furnace of death’s dragon-jaw is not inviting even to Englishmen receiving the word that duty bids them advance, and they require a leader of the way.  A national coxcombry that pretends to an independence of human sensations, and makes a motto of our dandiacal courage, is more perilous to the armies of the nation than that of a few heroes.  It is this coxcombry which has too often caused disdain of the wise chief’s maxim of calculation for winners, namely, to have always the odds on your side, and which has bled, shattered, and occasionally disgraced us.  Young Michell’s carrying powder-bags to the assault, and when ordered to retire, bearing them on his back, and helping a wounded soldier on the way, did surely well; nor did Mr. Beauchamp himself behave so badly on an occasion when the sailors of his battery caught him out of a fire of shell that raised jets of dust and smoke like a range of geysers over the open, and hugged him as loving women do at a meeting or a parting.  He was penitent before his uncle, admitting, first, that the men were not in want of an example of the contempt of death, and secondly, that he doubted whether it was contempt of death on his part so much as pride—­a hatred of being seen running.

‘I don’t like the fellow to be drawing it so fine,’ said Everard.  It sounded to him a trifle parsonical.  But his heart was won by Nevil’s determination to wear out the campaign rather than be invalided or entrusted with a holiday duty.

’I see with shame (admiration of them) old infantry captains and colonels of no position beyond their rank in the army, sticking to their post,’ said Nevil, ’and a lord and a lord and a lord slipping off as though the stuff of the man in him had melted.  I shall go through with it.’  Everard approved him.  Colonel Halkett wrote that the youth was a skeleton.  Still Everard encouraged him to persevere, and said of him: 

’I like him for holding to his work after the strain’s over.  That tells the man.’

He observed at his table, in reply to commendations of his nephew: 

’Nevil’s leak is his political craze, and that seems to be going:  I hope it is.  You can’t rear a man on politics.  When I was of his age I never looked at the newspapers, except to read the divorce cases.  I came to politics with a ripe judgement.  He shines in action, and he’ll find that out, and leave others the palavering.’