Amid circumstances
overwhelmingly difficult he must act so that every one, friend or rival,
relative, county magnate or brother officer, the man in his regiment or
the member of his club, the critic in England or the onlooker in
America, should say he had done precisely the right thing.
He used the words "precisely the right thing" because they formed a
ruling phrase in his career. For twenty-odd years they had been written
on the tablets of his heart and worn as frontlets between his brows.
They had first been used in connection with him by a great dowager
countess now deceased. She had said to his mother, apropos of some
forgotten bit of courtliness on his part, "You can always be sure that
Rupert will do precisely the right thing." Though he was but a lad at
Eton at the time, he had been so proud of this opinion, expressed with
all a dowager countess's authority, that from the moment it was repeated
to him by his mother he made it a device. It had kept him out of more
scrapes than he could reckon up, and had even inspired the act that
would make his name glorious as long as there were annals of the
Victoria Cross.
He had long been persuaded that had the dowager countess not thus given
the note to his character his record would never have been written on
that roll of heroes.
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