‘I could call him my poet also,’ Mr. Redworth agreed with her taste in poets.  ’His letters are among the best ever written—­or ever published:  the raciest English I know.  Frank, straight out:  capital descriptions.  The best English letter-writers are as good as the French—­

You don’t think so?—­in their way, of course.  I dare’ say we don’t sufficiently cultivate the art.  We require the supple tongue a closer intercourse of society gives.’

—­Eight or ten hundred.  Comfortable enough for a man in chambers.  To dream of entering as a householder on that sum, in these days, would be stark nonsense:  and a man two removes from a baronetcy has no right to set his reckoning on deaths:—­if he does, he becomes a sort of meditative assassin.  But what were the Fates about when they planted a man of the ability of Tom Redworth in a Government office!  Clearly they intended him to remain a bachelor for life.  And they sent him over to Ireland on inspection duty for a month to have sight of an Irish Beauty . . . .

‘Think war the finest subject for poets?’ he exclaimed.  ’Flatly no:  I don’t think it.  I think exactly the reverse.  It brings out the noblest traits in human character?  I won’t own that even.  It brings out some but under excitement, when you have not always the real man.—­Pray don’t sneer at domestic life.  Well, there was a suspicion of disdain.—­Yes, I can respect the hero, military or civil; with this distinction, that the military hero aims at personal reward—­’

‘He braves wounds and death,’ interposed Diana.

‘Whereas the civilian hero—­’

‘Pardon me, let me deny that the soldier-hero aims at a personal reward,’ she again interposed.

‘He gets it.’

‘If he is not beaten.’

‘And then he is no longer a hero.’

‘He is to me.’

She had a woman’s inveterate admiration of the profession of aims.  Mr. Redworth endeavoured to render practicable an opening in her mind to reason.  He admitted the grandeur of the poetry of Homer.  We are a few centuries in advance of Homer.  We do not slay damsels for a sacrifice to propitiate celestial wrath; nor do we revel in details of slaughter.  He reasoned with her; he repeated stories known to him of civilian heroes, and won her assent to the heroical title for their deeds, but it was languid, or not so bright as the deeds deserved—­or as the young lady could look; and he insisted on the civilian hero, impelled by some unconscious motive to make her see the thing he thought, also the thing he was—­his plain mind and matter-of-fact nature.  Possibly she caught a glimpse of that.  After a turn of fencing, in which he was impressed by the vibration of her tones when speaking of military heroes, she quitted the table, saying:  ’An argument between one at supper and another handing plates, is rather unequal if eloquence is needed.  As Pat said to the constable, when his hands were tied, You beat me with the fists, but my spirit is towering and kicks freely.’