No one could question their right to use that power.

Horace said to himself that he was probably a fool to entertain for a moment any hope of success under such conditions.
"Good Lord! It might depend upon whether the readers had indigestion," he thought; and at the same time he accepted the situation with a philosophic pride of surrender.
"It's about one chance in a good many thousand," he told himself.

"If I don't get the chance some other fellow does, and there's no mortal way but to make the best of it, unless I act like a fool myself." Horace was exceedingly alive to the lack of dignity of one who kicked against the pricks.

He said to himself that if he could not marry Rose, if he could not ask her why, he must accept his fate, not attack it to his own undoing, nor even deplore it to his ignominy.
In all this he was, rather curiously, leaving the girl and her possible view of the matter entirely out of the question.

Horace, while he was not in the least self-deprecatory, and was disposed to be as just in his estimate of himself as of other men, was not egotistical.