‘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.’

—­Eight hundred? a thousand a year, two thousand, are as nothing in the calculation of a householder who means that the mistress of the house shall have the choicest of the fruits and flowers of the Four Quarters; and Thomas Redworth had vowed at his first outlook on the world of women, that never should one of the sisterhood coming under his charge complain of not having them in profusion.  Consequently he was a settled bachelor.  In the character of disengaged and unaspiring philosophical bachelor, he reviewed the revelations of her character betrayed by the beautiful virgin devoted to the sanguine coat.  The thrill of her voice in speaking of soldier-heroes shot him to the yonder side of a gulf.  Not knowing why, for he had no scheme, desperate or other, in his head, the least affrighted of men was frightened by her tastes, and by her aplomb, her inoffensiveness in freedom of manner and self-sufficiency—­sign of purest breeding:  and by her easy, peerless