They were all looking at the bronze and Ernestine looked from one face to another, trying to understand why it moved none of them as it had her. Karl's face was very purposeful tonight, reflecting the stimulus of his talk with his friend. Filled with enthusiasm for this fight he was making, he had no eye in this hour for the triumph of the vanquished.
"Why I don't want to submit," he laughed just then. "I want to win!"
"An idea which has done a great deal of harm," observed Dr. Parkman. "That 'you'll-get-your-reward-somewhere-else' doctrine is the worst possible armour for life. The poets, of course, have always coddled the weak, but I see more poetry in the to-hell-with-defeat spirit myself."
That too she could understand—a simple matter of the arrogance of the successful.
And with Georgia it was that thing of "getting there"—the world's hard and fast standards of success and failure.
She too turned to the statue. Were they right, and she wrong? Was it just the art of it, the effectiveness, which moved her, and was the thought back of it indeed weakening sentimentality?
"Defend it, Ernestine," laughed Karl; and then, affectionately, seeing her seriousness, "Tell us what you see in it."
Dr. Parkman turned from the statue to her. He never forgot her face as it was then.
He had decided during the evening that her great charm was her exquisite femininity; she seemed to have all those graces of both mind and body which make for perfect loving. It was the world force of love, splendidly manifest in gentleness, he had felt in her first. But now something new flamed up within her. Here was power—power moving in the waves of passion through the channel of understanding. Her face had grown fairly stern in its insistence.
"But don't you see The keynote of it is that stubborn grip on the broken sword. I should think every fighter would love it for that. And it is more than the glory of the good fight. It is the glory of the unconquerable will. Look at the woman's face! The world calls him beaten. She knows that he has won. I see behind it the world's battlefields—'way back from the first I see them all, and I see that the thing which has shaped the world is not the success or failure of individual battles one-half so much as it is this wresting of victory from defeat by simply breathing victory even after the sword has been broken in the hand. What we call victory and defeat are incidents—things individual and temporal. The thing universal and eternal is this immortality of the spirit of victory. Why, every time I look at that grip on the broken sword,"—laughing now, but eyes shining—"I can feel the world take a bound ahead!"