In this strain General Feraud ran on, holding up his head with owlish eyes and rapacious beak. A mere fighter all his life, a cavalry man, a _sabreur_, he conceived war with the utmost simplicity as in the main a massed lot of personal contests, a sort of gregarious duelling. And here he had on hand a war of his own. He revived. The shadow of peace had passed away from him like the shadow of death. It was a marvellous resurrection of the named Feraud, Gabriel Florian, _engagé volontaire_ of 1793, general of 1814, buried without ceremony by means of a service order signed by the War Minister of the Second Restoration. IV No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It is our vanity which hurries us into situations from which we must come out damaged. Whereas pride is our safeguard by the reserve it imposes on the choice of our endeavour, as much as by the virtue of its sustaining power. General D'Hubert was proud and reserved. He had not been damaged by casual love affairs successful or otherwise. In his war-scarred body his heart at forty remained unscratched. Entering with reserve into his sister's matrimonial plans, he felt himself falling irremediably in love as one falls off a roof. He was too proud to be frightened. Indeed, the sensation was too delightful to be alarming. The inexperience of a man of forty is a much more serious thing than the inexperience of a youth of twenty, for it is not helped out by the rashness of hot blood. The girl was mysterious, as all young girls are, by the mere effect of their guarded ingenuity; and to him the mysteriousness of that young girl appeared exceptional and fascinating. But there was nothing mysterious about the arrangements of the match which Madame Léonie had arranged. There was nothing peculiar, either. It was a very appropriate match, commending itself extremely to the young lady's mother (her father was dead) and tolerable to the young lady's uncle--an old _émigré_, lately returned from Germany, and pervading cane in hand like a lean ghost of the _ancien régime_ in a long-skirted brown coat and powdered hair, the garden walks of the young lady's ancestral home.