All this fell in admirably with his natural bent.
Self-reliant, agreeably egotistical, convinced of the excellence of his social and mental equipment, Tom was saved from excess of conceit by a lively desire to please, an even more lively sense of humour, and an intelligence to which at this period nothing came amiss in the way of new impressions or experiences.
And, from henceforth, he was his own master, his thoughts, actions, purposes, belonging to himself and to himself alone.

Really the position was a little intoxicating! Realizing it, as he sat in the somewhat stuffy first-class carriage, on that brief hour's journey from Southampton to Marychurch, he had laughed out loud, hunching up his shoulders saucily, in a sudden outburst of irrepressible and boyish glee.
But as the line, clearing the purlieus of the great seaport, turns south-westward running through the noble oak and beech woods of Arnewood Forest, crossing its bleak moorlands--silver pink, at the present season, with fading heather--and cutting through its plantations of larch and Scotch fir, Tom Verity's mood sobered.

He watched the country reeling away to right and left past the carriage windows, and felt its peculiarly English and sylvan charm.

Yet he saw it all through a dazzle, as of mirage, in which floated phantom landscapes strangely different in sentiment and in suggestion .-- Some extravagantly luxuriant, as setting to crowded painted cities, some desert, amazingly vacant and desolate; but, in either case, poetic, alluring, exciting, as scenes far removed in climate, faith and civilization from those heretofore familiar can hardly fail to be.

India, and all which India stands for in English history, challenged his imagination, challenged his ambition, since in virtue of his nationality, young and inexperienced though he was, he went to her as a natural ruler, the son of a conquering race.