The tears filled her large, serious eyes, her lips quivered in melancholy smile, as sunshine plays with shower over autumn woodlands.  Was I not right?  Right, though the universe declare me wrong!  I would do it all again; if she loved me, she had authority to be first of all in my care; in love lie the highest duties of existence.

I had forgotten the subject on which we spoke; I was thinking only of her, her beauty, her tenderness, and the debt of deathless devotion that I owed her.  It was otherwise in her thought; she had not dropped the old thread, but, looking up, resumed.

“It is, then, an idea that you serve?”

Brought back from my reverie, “Could I serve a more worthy master?” I asked.

“You do not particularly love your countrymen, nine-tenths of whom you have never seen?  You do not particularly hate the hostile race, nine-tenths of whom you have never seen?”

“Abstractly, I hate them.  Kindliness of heart prevents individual hatred, and without kindliness of heart in the first place there can be no pure patriotism.”

“And for the other part.  What do you care for these men who herd in the old tombs, raise a pittance of vetch, and live the life of brutes? what for the lazzaroni of Naples, for the brigands of Romagua, the murderers of the Apennine?  Nay, nothing, indeed.  It is, then, for the land that you care, the mere face of the country, because it entombs myriad ancestors, because it is familiar in its every aspect, because it overflows with abundant beauty.  But is the land less fair when foreign sway domineers it? do the blossoms cease to crowd the gorge, the mists to fill it with rolling color? is the sea less purple around you, the sky less blue above, the hills, the fields, the forests, less lavishly lovely?”

“Yes, the land is less fair,” I said.  “It is a fair slave.  It loses beauty in the proportion of difference that exists between any two creatures,—­the one a slave of supple symmetry and perfect passivity, the other a daring woman who stands nearer heaven by all the height of her freedom.  And for these people of whom you speak, first I care for them because they are my countrymen,—­and next, because the idea which I serve is a purpose to raise them into free and responsible agents.”

“Each man does that for himself; no one can do it for another.”

“But any one may remove the obstacles from another’s way, scatter the scales from the eyes of the blind, strip the dead coral from the reef.”

She took yellow honeysuckles from a vase of massed amethyst and began to weave them in her yellow hair,—­humming a tune, the while, that was full of the subtilest curves of sound.  Soon she had finished, and finished the fresh thought as well.

“Do you know, my own,” she said, “the men who begin as hierophants of an idea are apt to lose sight of the pure purpose, and to become the dogged, bigoted, inflexible, unreasoning adherents of a party?  All leaders of liberal movements should beware how far they commit themselves to party-organizations.  Only that man is free.  It is easier to be a partisan than a patriot.”