His character was too indolent to defend itself against aspersion, and horror of a quarrelsome scene far greater than his heed of misconstruction.
"You are a brute to me!" went on the lad, with his querulous and bitter passion rising almost to tears like a woman's.

"You pretend you can refuse me nothing; and the moment I ask you the smallest thing you turn on me, and speak as if I were the greatest blackguard on earth.

You'll let me go to the bad to-morrow rather than bend your pride to save me; you live like a Duke, and don't care if I should die in a debtor's prison! You only brag about 'honor' when you want to get out of helping a fellow; and if I were to cut my throat to-night you would only shrug your shoulders, and sneer at my death in the clubroom, with a jest picked out of your cursed French novels!" "Melodramatic, and scarcely correct," murmured Bertie.
The ingratitude to himself touched him indeed but little; he was not given to making much of anything that was due to himself--partly through carelessness, partly through generosity; but the absence in his brother of that delicate, intangible, indescribable sensitive-nerve which men call Honor, an absence that had never struck on him so vividly as it did to-night, troubled him, surprised him, oppressed him.
There is no science that can supply this defect to the temperament created without it; it may be taught a counterfeit, but it will never own a reality.
"Little one, you are heated, and don't know what you say," he began very gently, a few moments later, as he leaned forward and looked straight in the boy's eyes.

"Don't be down about this; you will pull through, never fear.

Listen to me; go down to Royal, and tell him all frankly.