Mark returned to the subject on another occasion. He said:
“You know I have always been a great admirer of Dickens, and his ‘Tale of Two Cities’ I read at least every two years. Dickens witnessed my first holding hands with Livy when I took her to one of his lectures in New York. Now that I have finished ‘The Two Cities’ for the ’steenth time, I have come to this conclusion:
“Terror is an efficacious agent only when it doesn’t last. In the long run there is more terror in threats than in execution, for when you get used to terror your emotions get dulled. The incarnation of the White Terror, Robespierre, wasn’t awe-inspiring at all to the general public. Mention of his name did not send the children to bed, or make them crawl under the blankets. On the days when he made his great speeches, the galleries and the aisles of the Convention Hall were thronged with women, old and young—that does not look as if Robespierre had been an object of general fear or abomination—does it?”
RECOLLECTIONS OF KING CHARLES AND GRANT
“Now show me the place where that ancestor of mine had King Charlie beheaded.”
We had been sitting on some chairs which the great Napoleon had used in Saint Helena—the heaviest sort of mahogany, “and not a rat bite to be seen,” Mark pointed out, as we went exploring the Army Museum at Whitehall, London.
Agreeable to his demand, I took Mark by the arm and led him to a window looking out on the “Horse-Guards,” the famous old barracks, gazed at so much by American visitors.
“Outside of this window,” I explained, “the Commonwealth built a platform, and on this platform stood the block where Charles lost his silly bean.”
“Served the traitor right,” said Mark, “but that reminds me of——”
He thought a while, then repeated: