from Rosamund’s, to match her mysticism with something which would be able to call it out of its mysterious understanding.  Instead of retreating to God alone she might then, perhaps, take him with her; instead of praying over him she might pray with him.  If, after he returned from South Africa, Rosamund were ever again to be deliberately good with him, making such an effort as she had made on that horrible evening in Little Market Street when he had told her he was going on active service, he felt that he simply couldn’t bear it.

He put firmly aside the natural longings for home which often assailed him, and threw himself heart and soul into his new duties.  Already he felt happier, for he was “out” to draw from the present, from the whole of it, all the building material it contained, and was resolute to use all that material in the construction of a palace, a future based on marble, strong, simple, noble, a Parthenon of the future.  Only the weak man looks to omens, is governed in his mind, and so in his actions, by them.  That which he had not known how to win in an easy life he must learn to win in a life that was hard.  This war he would take as a gift to him, something to be used finely.  If he fell in it still he would have had his gift, the chance to realize some of his latent and best possibilities.  He swept out of his mind an old thought, the creeping surmise that perhaps Rosamund had given him all she had to give in lover’s love, that she knew how to love as child and as mother, but that she was incapable of being a great lover in man’s sense of the term when he applies it to woman.

Madeira was passed on January the twenty-fifth, and the men, staring across the sea, saw its lofty hills rising dreamily out of the haze, watchers of those who would not stop, who had no time for any eating of the lotus.  Heat came upon the ship, and there were some who pretended that they heard sounds, and smelled perfumes wafted, like messages, from the hidden shores on which probably they would never land.  Every one was kept busy, after a sail bath, with drilling, musketry instruction, physical drill, cleaning of accouterments, a dozen things which made the hours go quickly in a buzz of human activities.  Some of the men, Dion among them, were trying to learn Dutch under an instructor who knew the mysteries.  A call came for volunteers for inoculation, and both Dion and Worthington answered it, with between forty and fifty other men.  The prick of the needle was like the touch of a spark; soon after came a mystery of general wretchedness, followed by pains in the loins, a rise of temperature and extreme, in Dion’s case even intense, weakness.  He lay in his bunk trying to play the detective on himself, to stand outside of his body, saying to himself, “This is I, and I am quite unaffected by my bodily condition.”  For what seemed to him a long time he was fairly successful in his effort; then the body began to show definitely the power of its weakness upon the Ego, to asset itself