“I’ve found Milton and The Lays of Ancient Rome and Don Quixote, but I can’t find the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” said she. 203
“Judge Maxwell has it,” he nodded; “he carried it away more than a month ago. It was the first time he ever met an English translation, he said. I must get it from him; he has a remarkably short memory for borrowed books.”
Alice joined him in the laugh over the judge’s shortcoming.
“He’s a regular old dear!” she said.
“Ah, yes; if he was only forty years younger, Alice–if he was only forty years younger!” the colonel sighed.
“I like him better the way he is,” said she.
“Where did that boy ever hear tell of Marcus Aurelius?” he wondered.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand him, he seems so strange and deep. He’s not like a boy. You’d think, from talking with him, that he’d had university advantages.”
“It’s blood,” said the colonel, with the proud swelling of a man who can boast that precious endowment himself, “you can’t keep it down. There’s no use talking to me about this equality between men at the hour of birth; it’s all a poetic fiction. It would take forty generations of this European scum such as is beginning to drift across to us and taint our national atmosphere to produce one Joe Newbolt! And he’s got blood on only one side, at that.
“But the best in all the Newbolt generations that have gone before seem to be concentrated in that boy. He’ll come through this thing as bright as a new bullet, and he’ll make his mark in the world, too. Marcus Aurelius. Well, bless my soul!”