He was a popular boy, a favourite of women, and therefore full of engagements to Balls and dinners.  And he was a modest boy, though his uncle encouraged him to deliver his opinions freely and argue with men.  The little drummer attached to wheeling columns thinks not more of himself because his short legs perform the same strides as the grenadiers’; he is happy to be able to keep the step; and so was Nevil; and if ever he contradicted a senior, it was in the interests of the country.  Veneration of heroes, living and dead, kept down his conceit.  He worshipped devotedly.  From an early age he exacted of his flattering ladies that they must love his hero.  Not to love his hero was to be strangely in error, to be in need of conversion, and he proselytized with the ardour of the Moslem.  His uncle Everard was proud of his good looks, fire, and nonsense, during the boy’s extreme youth.  He traced him by cousinships back to the great Earl Beauchamp of Froissart, and would have it so; and he would have spoilt him had not the young fellow’s mind been possessed by his reverence for men of deeds.  How could he think of himself, who had done nothing, accomplished nothing, so long as he brooded on the images of signal Englishmen whose names were historic for daring, and the strong arm, and artfulness, all given to the service of the country?—­men of a magnanimity overcast with simplicity, which Nevil held to be pure insular English; our type of splendid manhood, not discoverable elsewhere.  A method of enraging him was to distinguish one or other of them as Irish, Scottish, or Cambrian.  He considered it a dismemberment of the country.  And notwithstanding the pleasure he had in uniting in his person the strong red blood of the chivalrous Lord Beauchamp with the hard and tenacious Romfrey blood, he hated the title of Norman.  We are English—­British, he said.  A family resting its pride on mere ancestry provoked his contempt, if it did not show him one of his men.  He had also a disposition to esteem lightly the family which, having produced a man, settled down after that effort for generations to enjoy the country’s pay.  Boys are unjust; but Nevil thought of the country mainly, arguing that we should not accept the country’s money for what we do not ourselves perform.  These traits of his were regarded as characteristics hopeful rather than the reverse; none of his friends and relatives foresaw danger in them.  He was a capital boy for his elders to trot out and banter.

Mrs. Rosamund Culling usually went to his room to see him and doat on him before he started on his rounds of an evening.  She suspected that his necessary attention to his toilet would barely have allowed him time to finish his copy of the letter.  Certain phrases had bothered him.  The thrice recurrence of ‘ma patrie’ jarred on his ear.  ‘Sentiments’ afflicted his acute sense of the declamatory twice.  ’C’est avec les sentiments du plus profond regret’:  and again, ’Je suis bien scar que vous comprendrez mes sentiments, et m’accorderez l’honneur que je reclame au nom de ma patrie outrage.’  The word ‘patrie’ was broadcast over the letter, and ‘honneur’ appeared four times, and a more delicate word to harp on than the others!