An absolute social nonchalance in every emergency, a perfect superiority to the fear of our fellow-beings singly or collectively, is attainable only in one of three ways, if we omit idiotic insensibility, sheer brute stolidity. First, by ourselves, as it were, impersonating and representing the established standard of judgment, the code by which we and our conduct are to be tested. This is the assured ease of the fashionable leader, the noble, the king. Second, by utterly defying that standard, and ignoring it, substituting for it a personal standard of our own, or the code of some special class of our associates. This is the sang-froid of the gambler, the stony courage of the habituated criminal. He is immovably collected, cool, and brave, in spite of his condemnation by law and morality, because he has displaced from his consciousness the social standard of judgment prevalent around him which he disobeys, and set up in its stead another standard which he obeys. His conscience then does not make a coward of him. Self-poised in what he himself thinks, he is not disturbed by mental reaction on what he imagines other people think. The moment he violates his own conscience or the code which he professes loyalty to, he feels guilty, and to that extent becomes weak and cowardly. The third method of superiority to fear is by conscious and direct obedience to the intrinsic right, the will of God. This is the imperial heroism of the saint and the martyr. Then the supreme code of the universe makes the harmonious conscience indomitably superior to the frowning penalties of all lesser and meaner codes, and no personal enemy, no hostile public opinion, can terrify. It was partly by the first, chiefly by the second, hardly at all, it is to be feared, by the third, of these methods that Gazonac acquired his marvellous self-possession and marble equilibrium of nerve. But he had it. And the perfected empire of his being in the range of his daily life, his transcendent fearlessness of everything external, his superlative feeling of competency to every occasion, was in itself a rare achievement and an enviable prize. He had disentangled and freed the fibres of his brain from all imaginative references to the opinions of other persons or to the requirements of any code but the one enthroned in his own bosom. To this imperfect code he was true, and therefore, however wrong and guilty he may have been, in his self-sufficingness he did not suffer the retributions of a bad conscience. He was shielded in the partial insensibility of a defective conscience. If the conscience of a man be pure and expansive enough properly to represent to him the will of God or the whole truth of his duty, then a neglectful superiority to individual censures and to social opinion is an heroic exaltation, which the more it sets other men against him so much the more it shows him to be diviner than they.