He knew that others,--perhaps not those who knew him best, but who nevertheless were the companions of many of his hours,--gave him the credit for such power.

Why should a man afflict himself by the inward burden of an unsatisfied craving, and allow his heart to sink into his very feet because a girl would not smile when he wooed her?
"If she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be!" He had repeated the lines to himself a score of times, and had been ashamed of himself because he could not make them come true to himself.
They had not come true in the least.

There he was, Arthur Fletcher, whom all the world courted, with his heart in his very boots! There was a miserable load within him, absolutely palpable to his outward feeling,--a very physical pain,--which he could not shake off.

As he threw the stones into the water he told himself that it must be so with him always.

Though the world did pet him, though he was liked at his club, and courted in the hunting-field, and loved at balls and archery meetings, and reputed by old men to be a rising star, he told himself that he was so maimed and mutilated as to be only half a man.
He could not reason about it.