He himself
observed himself with discontent, unable to fathom his
extraordinary lapse from self-control on the night of
his final address. He charged it to the strain of
unavoidable office work on top of the business of the
campaign, abused his nerves, talked of a few days' rest
when they had settled Winter. He could think of nothing
but the points he had forgotten when he had his great
chance. "The flag should have come in at the end," he
would say to himself, trying vainly to remember where it
did come in. He was ill pleased with the issue of that
occasion; and it was small compensation to be told by
Stella that his speech gave her shivers up and down her
back.
Meanwhile the theory of Empire coursed in his blood, fed
by the revelation of the future of his country in every
newspaper, by the calculated prophecies of American
onlookers, and by the telegrams which repeated the trumpet
notes of Wallingham's war upon the mandarinate of Great
Britain. It occupied him so that he began to measure and
limit what he had to say about it, and to probe the casual
eye for sympathy before he would give an inch of rope to
his enthusiasm. He found it as hard as ever to understand
that the public interest should be otherwise preoccupied,
as it plainly was, that the party organ, terrified of
Quebec, should shuffle away from the subject with
perfunctory and noncommittal reference, that among the
men he met in the street, nobody's blood seemed stirred,
whatever the day's news was from England.
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