“But you do know what it is. Were you ever afraid of anything in your life?”
The very words Nesta had used. Then he had not taken them in a complimentary sense. He had thought the remark a foolish one. Now coming from this woman, who had idealised him—who did still—with her wide luminous eyes turned full upon his face, and that unguarded softening which had again crept into her tone, there was a subtle flattery in it which was delicious, but enervating. As a matter of fact he really thought nothing of the feat, beyond what a lucky thing it was they should have been able to save both their lives. He answered so shortly as to seem ungracious.
“Very much and very often. I would rather run away than fight any day. Fact.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No? People don’t, I find. Some day I may do that very thing—then when everybody is howling me down I can always turn round and say—‘I told you so, and you wouldn’t believe me.’”
“But do you want them to believe you?”
“Why, of course. You don’t know me at all, Vivien, even now.” Then, as if to hurry away from a dangerous slip. “By the by, I never can understand the insane way in which even civilised and thinking people elect to deify what they call courage or pluck. There is no such thing really. It is purely a matter of opportunity or temperament—in short, sheer accident. To get out of a tight place a man has got to do something. While doing it he has no time to think. If he had, in nine cases out of ten he’d run away.”
“Yes? And what about when he has to go into a tight place?”
“Why, then he’s got to go. And as a matter of fact it is funk that drives him in. The opprobrium and possibly material penalty, he would incur by backing out constitute the more formidable alternative of the two. So of the two evils man, being essentially a self preserving animal, instinctively chooses the least.”
“Plausible, but not convincing,” returned Vivien, with a laugh. “And is there not something of what they call a ‘crank’ underlying that philosophy?”