The pity is--"
"Ah," said the artist-trooper, half wearily, half laughingly. "Spare me
the old world-worn, threadbare formulas. Because the flax and the laleza
blossom for use, and the garden flowers grow trained and pruned, must
there be no bud that opens for mere love of the sun, and swings free in
the wind in its fearless, fair fashion? Believe me, dear Victor, it is
the lives which follow no previous rule that do the most good and give
the most harvest."
"Surely. Only for this child--a woman--in her future--"
"Her future! Well, she will die, I dare say, some bright day or another,
at the head of a regiment; with some desperate battle turned by the
valor of her charge, and the sight of the torn tricolor upheld in her
little hands. That is what Cigarette hopes for--why not? There will
always be a million of commonplace women ready to keep up the decorous
traditions of their sex, and sit in safety over their needles by the
side of their hearths. One little lioness here and there in a generation
cannot do overmuch harm."
Cecil was silent. He would not cross the words of the wounded man by
saying what might bring a train of less pleasant thoughts--saying what,
in truth, was in his mind, that the future which he had meant for the
little Friend of the Flag was not that of any glorious death by combat,
but that of a life (unless no bullet early cut its silver cord in
twain) when youth should have fled, and have carried forever with it
her numberless graces, and left in its stead that ribaldry-stained,
drink-defiled, hardened, battered, joyless, cruel, terrible thing which
is unsightly and repugnant to even the lowest among men; which is as
the lees of the drunk wine, as the ashes of the burned-out fires, as the
discord of the broken and earth-clogged lyre.
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