The Lake of Wine by Bernard Capes — Read

There is a curious anomaly about the way in which a self-confidence, impervious to the stabs of ill-fortune, may be paralyzed in a moment by the little prick of a snub irresponsible. Now, I would not go so far as to say that the _sang-froid_ shown by Mr. Tuke over his virtual dismissal by Miss Royston represented the real state of his feelings; or that he did not find his appetite for a certain fruit stimulated by his disappointment of it. But, without doubt, the sting that most rankled for the moment in his vanity was that tart little rebuke administered to him by the aristocratic carline in the theatre-lobby. It was absurd, it was inexplicable -- but so it was. His sense of injury in the greater matter was quite overcrowded by his feeling of humiliation in the lesser. That was a little snake, but it swallowed all the rest -- so elastic is a proud stomach.

Perhaps it was all very beneficial to him. No doubt it was too much his way to _affect_ a good-humoured tolerance of destiny; to repudiate responsibility, in speech or act, on the strength of a certain genial creed of fatality that assumed itself independent of the laws of obligation. To have that much of the vagabond in one, that one moves serenely indifferent to conventional restrictions, is excellent; but to insist upon one's vagabondage is to be a didactic vagabond; and that is intolerable. For it is to assume that orthodox folk must accept vagabondage as the superior condition, which, being orthodox, they cannot.