"I smile with pleasure," he told her. "It serves only to make your
valiant little shoulders the more valiant. It may make you self-
conscious, but it likewise makes you absurdly self-confident."
For, be it known in advance, Lee Barton was a super-man and Ida
Barton a super-woman--or at least they were personalities so
designated by the cub book-reviewers, flat-floor men and women, and
scholastically emasculated critics, who from across the dreary
levels of their living can descry no glorious humans over-topping
their horizons. These dreary folk, echoes of the dead past and
importunate and self-elected pall-bearers for the present and
future, proxy-livers of life and vicarious sensualists that they
are in a eunuch sort of way, insist, since their own selves,
environments, and narrow agitations of the quick are mediocre and
commonplace, that no man or woman can rise above the mediocre and
commonplace.
Lacking gloriousness in themselves, they deny gloriousness to all
mankind; too cowardly for whimsy and derring-do, they assert whimsy
and derring-do ceased at the very latest no later than the middle
ages; flickering little tapers themselves, their feeble eyes are
dazzled to unseeingness of the flaming conflagrations of other
souls that illumine their skies.
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