“Nice! He is a hero.”
There was a long interval of silence. Each lady looked, without much interest, at the view. Mrs. Failing’s attitude towards Nature was severely aesthetic—an attitude more sterile than the severely practical. She applied the test of beauty to shadow and odour and sound; they never filled her with reverence or excitement; she never knew them as a resistless trinity that may intoxicate the worshipper with joy. If she liked a ploughed field, it was only as a spot of colour—not also as a hint of the endless strength of the earth. And today she could approve of one cloud, but object to its fellow. As for Miss Pembroke, she was not approving or objecting at all. “A hero?” she queried, when the interval had passed. Her voice was indifferent, as if she had been thinking of other things.
“A hero? Yes. Didn’t you notice how heroic he was?”
“I don’t think I did.”
“Not at dinner? Ah, Agnes, always look out for heroism at dinner. It is their great time. They live up to the stiffness of their shirt fronts. Do you mean to say that you never noticed how he set down Rickie?”
“Oh, that about poetry!” said Agnes, laughing. “Rickie would not mind it for a moment. But why do you single out that as heroic?”
“To snub people! to set them down! to be rude to them! to make them feel small! Surely that’s the lifework of a hero?”
“I shouldn’t have said that. And as a matter of fact Mr. Wonham was wrong over the poetry. I made Rickie look it up afterwards.”
“But of course. A hero always is wrong.”
“To me,” she persisted, rather gently, “a hero has always been a strong wonderful being, who champions—”