He had led the fashion; he came where he had to bear without a word the curses, oaths, and insults of a corporal or a sous-lieutenant.

He had been used to every delicacy and delight; he came where he had to take the coarse black bread of the army as a rich repast.

He had thought it too much trouble to murmur flatteries in great ladies' ears; he came where morning, noon, and night the inexorable demands of rigid rules compelled his incessant obedience, vigilance, activity, and self-denial.

He had known nothing from his childhood up except an atmosphere of amusement, refinement, brilliancy, and idleness; he came where gnawing hunger, brutalized jest, ceaseless toil, coarse obscenity, agonized pain, and pandemonaic mirth alternately filled the measure of the days.
A sharper contrast, a darker ordeal, rarely tried the steel of any man's endurance.

No Spartan could have borne the change more mutely, more staunchly than did the "dandy of the Household." The first years were, it is true, years of intense misery to him.
Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some petty tyrant's jibe, and he had to stand immovable, holding his peace.