So he set down Elsley for a bad man, to whom he was forced by hard circumstances to behave as if he were a good one.
The only way, therefore, in which he could vent his feeling, was by showing to Lucia that studied attention which sympathy and chivalry demand of a man toward an injured woman.

Not that he dared, or wished, to conduct himself with her as he did with Valencia, even had she not been a married woman; he did not know her as intimately as he did her sister; but still he had a right to behave as the most intimate friend of her family, and he asserted that right; and all the more determinedly because Elsley seemed now and then not to like it.

"I will teach him how to behave to a charming woman," said he to himself; and perhaps he had been wiser if he had not said it: but every man has his weak point, and chivalry was Major Campbell's.
"What do you think of that poet, Mellot ?" said he once, on returning from a pic-nic, during which Elsley had never noticed his wife; and, at last, finding Valencia engaged with Headley, had actually gone off, _pour pis aller_, to watch Lord Scoutbush fishing.
"Oh, clever enough, and to spare; and as well read a man as I know.

One of the Sturm-und-drang party, of course:--the express locomotive school, scream-and-go-head: and thinks me, with my classicism, a benighted pagan.

Still, every man has a right to his opinion.