Laurens, who had performed prodigies of valour, sighed heavily.  “I felt as you did while the engagement lasted,” he replied.  “But I went into the battle with exultation, for death this time seemed inevitable.  And the only result is a headache.  What humiliation!”

“You are morbid, my dear,” said Hamilton, tenderly.  “You cannot persuade me that at the age of twenty-five naught remains but death—­no matter what mistakes one may have made.  There is always the public career—­for which you are eminently fitted.  I would begin life over again twenty times if necessary.”

“Yes, because you happen to be a man of genius.  I am merely a man of parts.  There are many such.  Not only is my life ruined, but every day I despair anew of ever attaining that high ideal of character I have set for myself.  I want nothing short of perfection,” he said passionately.  “Could I attain that, I should be content to live, no matter how wretched.  But I fall daily.  My passions control me, my hatreds, my impulses of the moment.  When a man’s very soul aches for a purity which it is in man to attain if he will, and when he is daily reminded that he is but a whimperer at the feet of the statue, the world is no place for him.”

“Laurens,” said Hamilton, warmly, “you refine on the refinements of sensibility.  You have brooded until you no longer are normal and capable of logic.  Compare your life with that of most men, and hope.  You are but twenty-five, and you have won a deathless glory, by a valour and brilliancy on these battlefields that no one else has approached.  Your brain and accomplishments are such that the country looks to you as one of its future guides.  Your character is that of a Bayard.  It is your passions alone, my dear, which save you from being a prig.  Passion is the furnace that makes greatness possible.  If, when the mental energies are resting, it darts out tongues of flame that strike in the wrong place, I do not believe that the Almighty, who made us, counts them as sins.  They are natural outlets, and we should burst without them.  If one of those tongues of flame was the cause of your undoing, God knows you have paid in kind.  As a rule no one is the worse, while most are better.  A certain degree of perfection we can attain, but absolute perfection—­go into a wilderness like Mohammed and fast.  There is no other way, and even then you merely would have visions; you would not be yourself.”

Laurens laughed.  “It is not easy to be morbid when you are by.  Acquit me for the rest of the night.  And it is time we slept.  There will be hot work to-morrow.  How grandly the Chief rallied!  There is a man!”

“He was in a blazing temper,” remarked Hamilton.  “Lee and Ramsay and Stewart were like to have died of fright.  I wish to God he’d strung the first to a gibbet!”

They sought out Washington and lay down beside him.  The American army slept as though its soul had withdrawn to another realm where repose is undisturbed.  Not so the British army.  Sir Henry Clinton did not share Washington’s serene confidence in the morrow.  He withdrew his weary army in the night, and was miles away when the dawn broke.