g killed. Then it came to him suddenly as a
clear and simple truth, as something luminously plain, that it is better
to get killed than go away defeated by such fears and unsteadiness as
his. The change came into his mind as if a white light were suddenly
turned on--where there had been nothing but shadows and darkness. He
rose to his feet and went swiftly and intently the whole way back, going
with a kind of temperate recklessness, and, because he was no longer
careful, easily. He went on beyond his starting place toward the corner,
and did that supreme bit, to and fro, that bit where the lump was
falling away, and he had to crouch, as gaily as the rest. Then he
recrossed the Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the pines to
the crest, and returned through the meadows to his own hotel.

After that he should have slept the sleep of contentment, but instead
he had quite dreadful nightmares, of hanging in frozen fear above
incredible declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to slippery
footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly in the middle and
headed him down and down....

The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse again with those dreams
like trailing mists in his mind, and by comparison the path of the Bisse
was nothing, it was like walking along a kerbstone, it was an exercise
for young ladies....

7

In his younger days Benham had regarded Fear as a shameful secret and as
a thing to be got rid of altogether. It seemed to him that to feel fear
was to fall short of aristocracy, and in spite of the deep dreads
and disgusts that haunted his mind, he set about the business of its
subjugation as if it were a spiritual amputation. But as he emerged
from the egotism of adolescence he came to realize that this was
too comprehensive an operation; every one feels fear, and your true
aristocrat is not one who has eliminated, but one who controls or
ignores it. Brave men are men who do things when they are afraid to do
them, just as Nelson, even when he was seasick, and he was frequently
seasick, was still master of the sea. Benham developed two leading ideas
about fear; one that it is worse at the first onset, and far worse than
any real experience, and the other that fear is essentially a social
instinct. He set himself upon these lines to study--what can we call
it?--the taming of fear, the nature, care, and management of fear....

"Fear is very like pain in this, that it is a deterrent