For him there was no sympathy; no tenderness of love; no retreat, save into himself, from the loud brass band of the outer world.
The blow hit him terribly hard.

It did not come altogether unexpectedly, and yet, when it did come, it was all but unendurable.
He had made so much of the power of walking into that august chamber, and sitting shoulder to shoulder in legislative equality with the sons of dukes and the curled darlings of the nation.

Money had given him nothing, nothing but the mere feeling of brute power: with his three hundred thousand pounds he had felt himself to be no more palpably near to the goal of his ambition than when he had chipped stones for three shillings and sixpence a day.

But when he was led up and introduced at that table, when he shook the old premier's hand on the floor of the House of Commons, when he heard the honourable member for Barchester alluded to in grave debate as the greatest living authority on railway matters, then, indeed, he felt that he had achieved something.
And now this cup was ravished from his lips, almost before it was tasted.

When he was first told as a certainty that the decision of the committee was against him, he bore up against the misfortune like a man.