Not quite to such an extent
was he the incarnation of Scaramouche. But sufficiently was he so
ever to mask his true feelings by an arresting gesture, his true
thoughts by an effective phrase. He was the actor always, a man
ever calculating the effect he would produce, ever avoiding
self-revelation, ever concerned to overlay his real character by
an assumed and quite fictitious one. There was in this something
of impishness, and something of other things.
Nobody laughed now at his flippancy. He did not intend that
anybody should. He intended to be terrible; and he knew that the
more flippant and casual his tone, the more terrible would be its
effect. He produced exactly the effect he desired.
What followed in a place where feelings and practices had become
what they had become is not difficult to surmise. When the session
rose, there were a dozen spadassins awaiting him in the vestibule,
and this time the men of his own party were less concerned to guard
him. He seemed so entirely capable of guarding himself; he appeared,
for all his circumspection, to have so completely carried the war
into the enemy's camp, so completely to have adopted their own
methods, that his fellows scarcely felt the need to protect him
as yesterday.
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