He told himself, sometimes, that this helping another man to fight his tiger skin was assisting himself to fight his own.
Arkwright was trying very hard not to think of Alice Greggory these days.

He had come back hoping that he was in a measure "cured" of his "folly," as he termed it; but the first look into Alice Greggory's blue-gray eyes had taught him the fallacy of that idea.

In that very first meeting with Alice, he feared that he had revealed his secret, for she was plainly so nervously distant and ill at ease with him that he could but construe her embarrassment and chilly dignity as pity for him and a desire to show him that she had nothing but friendship for him.
Since then he had seen but little of her, partly because he did not wish to see her, and partly because his time was so fully occupied.

Then, too, in a round-about way he had heard a rumor that Calderwell was engaged to be married; and, though no feminine name had been mentioned in connection with the story, Arkwright had not hesitated to supply in his own mind that of Alice Greggory.
Beginning with the "jamboree," which came off quite in accordance with Calderwell's prophecies, Arkwright spent the most of such time as was not given to his professional duties in deliberately cultivating the society of Bertram and his friends.

To this extent he met with no difficulty, for he found that M.J.Arkwright, the new star in the operatic firmament, was obviously a welcome comrade.