Still another view may be had by setting down what John Dexter said to his wife, and what she said to him. Said he, when he had recounted the renunciation of Grant Adams:

“There goes the third devil. First he conquered the temptation to marry and be comfortable; next he put fame behind him, and now he renounces power.”

And she said: “It had never occurred to me to consider Laura Van Dorn, or national reputation, or a genuine chance for great usefulness as a devil. I’m not sure that I like your taste in devils.”

To which answer may be made again by Mr. Left in a communication he received from George Meredith, who had recently passed over. It was verified by certain details as to the arrangement of the books on the little table in the little room in the little house on a little hill where he was wont to write, and it ran thus:

“Women, always star-hungry, ever uncompromising in their demand for rainbows, nibbling at the entre’ and pushing aside the roast, though often adoring primitive men who gorge on it, but ever in the end rewarding abstinence and thus selecting a race of spiritually-minded men for mates, are after all the world’s materialists.”

468CHAPTER XLII
A CHAPTER WHICH IS CONCERNED LARGELY WITH THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF “THE FULL STRENGTH OF THE COMPANY”

This story, first of all, and last of all, is a love story. The emotion called love and its twin desire hunger, are the two primal passions of life. From love have developed somewhat the great altruistic institutions of humanity–the family, the tribe, the State, the nation, and the varied social activities–religion, patriotism, philanthropy, brotherhood. While from hunger have developed war and trade and property and wealth. Often it happens in the growth of life that men have small choice in matters of living that are motived by hunger or its descendant concerns; for necessity narrows the choice. But in affairs of the heart, there comes wide latitudes of choice. It is reasonably just therefore to judge a man, a nation, a race, a civilization, an era, by its love affairs. So a book that would tell of life, that would paint the manners of men, and thus show their hearts, must be a love story. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” runs the proverb, and, mind you, it says heart–not head, not mind, but heart; as a man thinketh in his heart, in that part of his nature where reside his altruistic emotions–so is he.

It is the sham and shame of the autobiographies that flood and dishearten the world, that they are so uncandid in their relation of those emotional episodes in life–episodes which have to do with what we know for some curious reason as “the softer passions.” Cæsar’s Gaelic wars, his bridges, his trouble with the impedimenta, his fights with the Helvetians–who cares for them? Who cares greatly for Napoleon’s expedition against the Allies? Of what human interest is Grant’s tale of the Wilderness fighting? But to know of Calpurnia, of her predecessors, and her heirs and assigns in 469Cæsar’s heart; to know the truth about Josephine and the crash in Napoleon’s life that came with her heartbreak–if a crash did come, or if not, to know frankly what did come; to know how Grant got on with Julia Dent through poverty and riches, through sickness and in health, for better or for worse–with all the strain and stress and struggle that life puts upon the yoke that binds the commonplace man to the commonplace woman rising to eminence by some unimportant quirk of his genius reacting on the times–these indeed would be memoirs worth reading.

And whatever worth this story holds must come from its value as a love-story,–the narrative of how love rose or fell, grew or withered, bloomed and fruited, or rotted at the core in the lives of those men and women who move through the scenes painted upon this canvas. After all, who cares that Thomas Van Dorn waxed fat in the land, that he received academic degrees from great universities which his masters supported, that he told men to go and they went, to come and they came? These things are of no consequence. Men are doing such things every minute of every day in all the year.