“No writer has yet done anything like justice to the old soldier cult in the post-bellum South.  Doubtless it may lie out of the province of you historians, but what a theme for a new Thackeray!  With such a fetish your priestcraft of the Middle Ages is not to be compared for a moment.  There is no parallel among civilized nations; to find one you must go to the Voodooism of the savage black.  For more than a generation all the intelligence of the South has been asked, nay compelled, to come and bow down before these alms-begging loblollies.  To refuse to make obeisance was treason.  The entire public thought of a vast section of the country has revolved around the figure of a worthless old grafter in a tattered gray shirt.  Every question is settled when some moth-eaten ne’er-do-well lets out what is known as a ‘rebel yell.’  The most polished and profound speech conceivable is answered when a jackass mounts the platform and brays out something about the gallant boys in gray.  The cry for progress, for material advancement, for moral and social betterment, is stifled, that everybody may have breath to shout for a flapping trouser’s leg worn by a degraded old sot.  All that your Southern statesmen have had to give a people who were stripped to the bone is fulsome rhetoric about the Wounded Warrior of Wahoo, or some other inflated nonentity, whereupon the mesmerized population have loyally fallen on their faces and shouted, ‘Praise the Lord.’  And all the while they were going through this wretched mummery, they were hungry and thirsty and naked—­destitute in a smiling land of plenty.  Do you wonder that I think old-soldierism is the meanest profession the Lord ever suffered to thrive?  I tell you Baal and Moloch never took such toll of their idolaters as these shabby old gods of the gray shirt.”

“Professor Nicolovius,” said Queed, with a slow smile, “where on earth do you exhume your ideas of Southern history?”

“Observation, my dear boy!  God bless us, haven’t I had three years of this city to use my eyes and ears in?  And I had a peculiar training in my youth,” he added, retrospectively, “to fit me to see straight and generalize accurately.”

...  Couldn’t the man see that no persecuted Irishman ever talked in such a way since the world began?  If he had a part to play, why in the name of common sense couldn’t he play it respectably?

Queed got up, and began strolling about the floor.  In his mind was what Sharlee Weyland had said to him two hours before:  “All the bitterness nowadays comes from the non-combatants, the camp-followers, the sutlers, and the cowards.”  Under which of these heads did his friend, the old professor, fall?...  Why had he ever thought of Nicolovius as, perhaps, a broken Union officer?  A broken Union officer would feel bitter, if at all, against the Union.  A man who felt so bitter against the South—­

A resolution was rapidly hardening in the young man’s mind.  He felt this attitude of doubt and suspicion, these thoughts that he was now thinking about the man whose roof he shared, as an unclean spot upon his chaste passion for truth.  He could not feel honest again until he had wiped it off....  And, after all, what did he owe to Nicolovius?