To her it was a badge, an
ornament, the excuse for a luxurious pilgrimage of fair women living
delicately in silken tents, and clothed in fine garments of a fanciful
fashion. The contrast was too strong, too painful. Eleanor and her girl
knights would be too wholly out of place, with their fancies and their
whims, in an army of devoted men fighting for a faith, for a faith's
high principle as between race and race, and for all which that faith
had made sacred in its most holy places. It was too much. In
profoundest disappointment and sadness Bernard's head sank upon his
breast, and he raised his hands a little, to let them fall again upon
his knees, as if he were almost ready to give up the struggle.
Eleanor felt the wicked little thrill of triumph in his apparent
despair which compensates schoolboys for unimaginable labour in
mischief, when they at last succeed in hurting the feelings of a long-
suffering teacher. There had been nothing but an almost childish desire
to tease at the root of all that she had said; for before all things
she was young and gay, and her surroundings tended in every way to
repress both gayety and youth.
"You must not take everything I say in earnest," she said suddenly,
with a laugh that jarred on the delicate nerves of the overwrought man.
He turned his head from her as if the sight of her face would have been
disagreeable just then.
"Jest with life if you can," he said. "Jest with death if you are brave
enough; yet at least be earnest in this great matter.
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