Look at that fawn there,' said he, turning away his face to hide the tear in his eye, 'did you ever see more perfect motion ?' Alaric was touched; but there was more triumph than sympathy in his heart.

It was sweet, much too sweet, to him to hear his superiority thus acknowledged.

He was superior to the men who worked round him in his office.

He was made of a more plastic clay than they, and despite the inferiority of his education, he knew himself to be fit for higher work than they could do.

As the acknowledgement was made to him by the man whom, of those around him, he certainly ranked second to himself, he could not but feel that his heart's blood ran warm within him, he could not but tread with an elastic step.
But it behoved him to answer Harry, and to answer him in other spirit than this.
'Oh, Harry,' said he, 'you have some plot to ruin me by my own conceit; to make me blow myself out and destroy myself, poor frog that I am, in trying to loom as largely as that great cow, Fidus Neverbend.