"
Strangely enough this speech did more to fix Dorothea's resolve than
all she had read or heard of the rigours of the war-prison. Gently
reared though she was, physical suffering seemed to her less
intolerable than to be unjustly held in this extreme of scorn..
This was the deeper wrong; and putting herself in her lover's place,
feeling with his feelings, she knew it to be by far the deeper. In
Dartmoor he shared the sufferings of men unfortunate but not
despicable, punished for fighting in their country's cause. But here
was a moral punishment, deserved by none but the vilest; and she had
helped to bring it--was allowing it to rest--upon a hero!
In the long watches of that night it never occurred to her that the
brutality of her brother's contempt was over-done. And Endymion, not
given to self-questioning at any time, was probably unconscious of a
dull wrath revenging itself for many pin-pricks of Master Raoul's
clever tongue. Endymion Westcote, like many pompous men, usually hurt
somebody when he indulged in a joke, and for this cause, perhaps, had
a nervous dislike of wit in others. Dull in taking a jest, but almost
preternaturally clever in suspecting one, he had disliked Raoul's
sallies in proportion as they puzzled him. The remembrance of them
rankled, and this had been his bull-roar of revenge.
He spent the next morning in his office; and returning at three in the
afternoon, retired to the library to draw up the usual monthly report
required of him as Commissary.
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