“My brother expected to meet me here; he ran off with our carriage,” Shirley explained.
“These last errands are always trying—there are innumerable things one would like to come back for from mid-ocean, tariff or no tariff.”
“There’s the wireless,” said Shirley. “In time we shall be able to commit our afterthoughts to it. But lost views can hardly be managed that way. After I get home I shall think of scores of things I should like to see again—that photographs don’t give.”
“Such as—?”
“Oh—the way the Pope looks when he gives his blessing at St. Peter’s; and the feeling you have when you stand by Napoleon’s tomb—the awfulness of what he did and was—and being here in Switzerland, where I always feel somehow the pressure of all the past of Europe about me. Now,”—and she laughed lightly,—“I have made a most serious confession.”
“It is a new idea—that of surveying the ages from these mountains. They must be very wise after all these years, and they have certainly seen men and nations do many evil and wretched things. But the history of the world is all one long romance—a tremendous story.”
“That is what makes me sorry to go home,” said Shirley meditatively. “We are so new—still in the making, and absurdly raw. When we have a war, it is just politics, with scandals about what the soldiers have to eat, and that sort of thing; and there’s a fuss about pensions, and the heroic side of it is lost.”
“But it is easy to overestimate the weight of history and tradition. The glory of dead Caesar doesn’t do the peasant any good. When you see Italian laborers at work in America digging ditches or laying railroad ties, or find Norwegian farmers driving their plows into the new hard soil of the Dakotas, you don’t think of their past as much as of their future—the future of the whole human race.”
Armitage had been the subject of so much jesting between Dick and herself that it seemed strange to be talking to him. His face brightened pleasantly when he spoke; his eyes were grayer than she had mockingly described them for her brother’s benefit the day before. His manner was gravely courteous, and she did not at all believe that he had followed her about.
Her ideals of men were colored by the American prejudice in favor of those who aim high and venture much. In her childhood she had read Malory and Froissart with a boy’s delight. She possessed, too, that poetic sense of the charm of “the spirit of place” that is the natural accompaniment of the imaginative temperament. The cry of bugles sometimes brought tears to her eyes; her breath came quickly when she sat—as she often did—in the Fort Myer drill hall at Washington and watched the alert cavalrymen dashing toward the spectators’ gallery in the mimic charge. The work that brave men do she admired above anything else in the world. As a child in Washington she had looked wonderingly upon the statues of heroes and the frequent military pageants of the capital; and she had wept at the solemn pomp of military funerals. Once on a battleship she had thrilled at the salutes of a mighty fleet in the Hudson below the tomb of Grant; and soon thereafter had felt awe possess her as she gazed upon the white marble effigy of Lee in the chapel at Lexington; for the contemplation of heroes was dear to her, and she was proud to believe that her father, a veteran of the Civil War, and her soldier brother were a tie between herself and the old heroic times.