Oh, delicious creed!" Laura broke out: "Oh, dear and sweet doctrine!
that results and developments in a world where there is more evil than
good are approved by heaven." She twisted the mild man in supple steel of
her irony so tenderly that Vittoria marvelled to hear her speak of him in
abhorrence when they quitted the village. "Not to be born a woman, and
voluntarily to be a woman!" ejaculated Laura. "How many, how many are we
to deduct from the male population of Italy? Cross in hand, he should be
at the head of our arms, not whimpering in a corner for white bread.
Wretch! he makes the marrow in my bones rage at him. He chronicled pig
that squeaked."

"Why had she been so gentle with him?"

"Because, my dear, when I loathe a thing I never care to exhaust my
detestation before I can strike it," said the true Italian.

They were on the field of Goito; it was won. It was won against odds. At
Pastrengo they witnessed an encounter; this was a battle. Vittoria
perceived that there was the difference between a symphony and a lyric
song. The blessedness of the sensation that death can be light and easy
dispossessed her of the meaner compassion, half made up of cowardice,
which she had been nearly borne down by on the field of Pastrengo. At an
angle on a height off the left wing of the royal army the face of the
battle was plain to her: the movements of the troops were clear as
strokes on a slate. Laura flung her life into her eyes, and knelt and
watched, without summing one sole thing from what her senses received.

Vittoria said, "We are too far away to understand it."

"No," said Laura, "we are too far away to feel it."

The savage soul of the woman was robbed of its share of tragic emotion by
having to hold so far aloof. Flashes of guns were but flashes of guns up
there where she knelt. She thirsted to read the things written by them;
thirsted for their mystic terrors, somewhat as souls of great prophets
have craved for the full revelation of those fitful underlights which
inspired their mouths.

Charles Albert's star was at its highest when the Piedmontese drums beat
for an advance of the whole line at Goito.

Laura stood up, white as furnace-fire. "Women can do some good by
praying," she said. She believed that she had been praying. That was her
part in the victory.

Rain fell as from the forehead of thunder. From black eve to black dawn
the women were among dead and dying men, where the lanterns trailed a
slow