It was within
that the trouble lay, if trouble it could be accounted, which marked
him apart from his fellows. The Duke was religious. Not in any of
the ordinary senses of the word; he took small heed of High Church
or Evangelical standpoints, he stood outside of all the movements
and missions and cults and crusades of the day, uncaring and uninterested.
Yet in a mystical-practical way of his own, which had
served him unscathed and unshaken through the fickle years of
boyhood, he was intensely and intensively religious. His family were
naturally, though unobtrusively, distressed about it. ``I am so afraid
it may affect his bridge,'' said his mother.
The Duke sat in a pennyworth of chair in St. James's Park, listening
to the pessimisms of Belturbet, who reviewed the existing
political situation from the gloomiest of standpoints.
``Where I think you political spade-workers are so silly,'' said the
Duke, ``is in the misdirection of your efforts. You spend thousands
of pounds of money, and Heaven knows how much dynamic force
of brain power and personal energy, in trying to elect or displace
this or that man, whereas you could gain your ends so much more
simply by making use of the men as you find them.
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