He wept for her friends, embodying in them all of their class--for little Bessy Bell, with her exquisite golden beauty, her wonderful smile that was a light of joy--a child of fifteen with character and mind, not yet sullied, not yet wholly victim to the unstable spirit of the day.
And traveling in this army that seemed to march before Lane's eyes were the slackers, like Mackay and Swann, representative of that horde of cowards who in one way or another had avoided the service--the young men who put comfort, ease, safety, pleasure before all else--who had no ideal of womanhood--who could not have protected women--who would not fight to save women from the apish Huns--who remained behind to fall in the wreck of the war's degeneration, and to dance, to drink, to smoke, to ride the women to their debasement.
And for the first and the last time Lane wept for himself, pitifully as a child lost and helpless, as a strong man facing irreparable loss, as a boy who had dreamed beautiful dreams, who had loved and given and trusted, who had suffered insupportable agonies of body and soul, who had fought like a lion for what he represented to himself, who had killed and killed--and whose reward was change, indifference, betrayal and death.
That dark hour passed.

Lane lay spent in the blackness of his room.
His heart had broken.

But his spirit was as unquenchable as the fire of the sun.

If he had a year, a month, a week, a day longer to live he could never live it untrue to himself.

Life had marked him to be a sufferer, a victim.