Title:  He Knew He Was Right

Author:  Anthony Trollope

Release Date:  February, 2004 [EBook #5140] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 13, 2002] [Most recently updated:  June 25, 2003]

Edition:  11

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT

CHAPTER I

SHEWING HOW WRATH BEGAN

When Louis Trevelyan was twenty-four years old, he had all the world before him where to choose; and, among other things, he chose to go to the Mandarin Islands, and there fell in love with Emily Rowley, the daughter of Sir Marmaduke, the governor.  Sir Marmaduke Rowley, at this period of his life, was a respectable middle-aged public servant, in good repute, who had, however, as yet achieved for himself neither an exalted position nor a large fortune.  He had been governor of many islands, and had never lacked employment; and now, at the age of fifty, found himself at the Mandarins, with a salary of 3,000 pounds a year, living in a temperature at which 80 in the shade is considered to be cool, with eight daughters, and not a shilling saved.  A governor at the Mandarins who is social by nature and hospitable on principle, cannot save money in the islands even on 3,000 pounds a year when he has eight daughters.  And at the Mandarins, though hospitality is a duty, the gentlemen who ate Sir Rowley’s dinners were not exactly the men whom he or Lady Rowley desired to welcome to their bosoms as sons-in-law.  Nor when Mr Trevelyan came that way, desirous of seeing everything in the somewhat indefinite course of his travels, had Emily Rowley, the eldest of the flock, then twenty years of age, seen as yet any Mandariner who exactly came up to her fancy.  And, as Louis Trevelyan was a remarkably handsome young man, who was well connected, who had been ninth wrangler at Cambridge, who had already published a volume of poems, and who possessed 3,000 pounds a year of his own, arising from various perfectly secure investments, he was not forced to sigh long in vain.  Indeed, the Rowleys, one and all, felt that providence had been very good to them in sending young Trevelyan on his travels in that direction, for he seemed to be a very pearl among men.  Both Sir Marmaduke and Lady Rowley felt that there might be objections to such a marriage as that proposed to them, raised by the Trevelyan family.  Lady Rowley would not have liked her daughter to go to England, to be received with cold looks by strangers.