Her husband wrote her that the best policy for a man financially
in peril was to be extravagant enough to discredit belief in his need to
lessen expenditure. He was, moreover, pleasantly aware that the improving
conditions of trade this summer of 1859 had enabled him to collect some
large outstanding debts. He encouraged Leila to remember their old
village friends, but when he proposed a set of furs for Ann Penhallow's
winter wear Leila became ingeniously impossible about choice, and the
Squire's too lavish generosity somehow failed to materialize; but why or
how was not clear to him because of their being feminine diplomatic
ways--which attain results and leave with the male a mildly felt
resentment without apparent cause of defeat.
As Cadet No. 3 of his class in this year's studies made the railway
journey of a warm June day, he recalled with wondering amusement his
first lonely railway travel. "I was a perfect little snob." The formal,
too old-mannered politeness of his childhood had left, if the child is
father of the man, an inheritance of pleasant courtesy which was unusual
and had varied values in the intercourse of life. Rivers said of him
later that the manner of John Penhallow's manners had the mystery of
charm. Even when younger, at Grey Pine, he liked to talk to people, with
curiosity about their lives and their work.
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