Was, then, she thought, this grand, dead Past so shallow to him?
These knights, pure, unstained, searching until death for the Holy Grail, could he understand the life-long agony, the triumph of their conflict over Self?
These women, content to live in solitude forever because they once had loved, could any man understand that?
Or the dead queen, dead that the man she loved might be free and happy,--why, this WAS life,--this death! But did pain, and martyrdom, and victory lie back in the days of Galahad and Arthur alone?
The homely face grew stiller than before, looking out into the dun sweep of moorland,--cold, unrevealing.

It baffled the man that looked at it.
He shuffled, chewed tobacco vehemently, tilted his chair on two legs, broke out in a thunder-gust at last.
"Dead days for dead men! The world hears a bugle-call to-day more noble than any of your piping troubadours.

We have something better to fight for than a vacant tomb." The old man drew himself up haughtily.
"I know what you would say,--Liberty for the low and vile.

It is a good word.

That was a better which they hid in their hearts in the old time,--Honour!" Honour! I think, Calvinist though he was, that word was his religion.
Men have had worse.