He had avoided them of old as bores and fanatics who would needs wake him from his luxurious dreams.

He had even hated them, simply because they were more righteous than he.

He would be a new man henceforth.
He strode down the hill through the cannon-guarded vineyards, among the busy groups of peasants.
"Yes, Marie was right.

Life is meant for work, and not for ease; to labour in danger and in dread; to do a little good ere the night comes, when no man can work: instead of trying to realise for oneself a Paradise; not even Bunyan's shepherd-paradise, much less Fourier's Casino-paradise; and perhaps least of all, because most selfish and isolated of all, my own heart-paradise--the apotheosis of loafing, as Claude calls it.

Ah, Tennyson's Palace of Art is a true word--too true, too true! "Art?
What if the most necessary human art, next to the art of agriculture, be, after all, the art of war?
It has been so in all ages.
What if I have been befooled--what if all the Anglo-Saxon world has been befooled by forty years of peace?
We have forgotten that the history of the world has been as yet written in blood; that the story of the human race is the story of its heroes and its martyrs--the slayers and the slain.