"He has cost a thousand lives."
"You are talking like a Socialist," said Lady Mary curtly.
Peter felt in her a coldness that passed. She was looking over the moors as though she followed the blind eyes of the naked boy. Her attitude suggested that she, too, was part of this challenge. Her dress, conveying to Peter an impression of complicated and finished art, fell away from her shoulders as, with head flung back, she filled her eyes with the beauty of earth and sky. She interpreted in radiant life the cold metal of the statue. Civilisation was justified in her, or it could not be justified.
"Have you never any doubt?" said Peter, wistfully impulsive.
Lady Mary turned slowly from the moor. Her calm eyes swept over him.
"Doubt?" she echoed.
"Do you never wonder whether all this"—Peter made one of the large gestures of his mother—"is worth the noise and the dirt over there? Have you no doubt at all?"
"How is it possible to doubt?" she calmly responded. She stood proudly facing him. But she read perplexity in his face and, as it seemed to Peter, she stooped to him.
"Don't you see," she almost pleaded, "that either we must believe in ourselves or make way; and we do believe. I believe in all this"—she faintly parodied Peter's large gesture—"and I believe in myself."
There was a pause, and it was Lady Mary who spoke again. Almost it seemed that she wanted to make her point.