. Yet, not so very
strange, if, as they said, man made God in his own image! Here indeed
was a curious mating of what the philosophers would call the will to
Love, and the will to Power!

A soldier and his girl came and sat down on a bench close by. They
looked askance at this trim and upright figure with the fighting face;
then, some subtle thing informing them that he was not of the disturbing
breed called officer, they ceased to regard him, abandoning themselves to
dumb and inexpressive felicity. Arm in arm, touching each other, they
seemed to Courtier very jolly, having that look of living entirely in the
moment, which always especially appealed to one whose blood ran too fast
to allow him to speculate much upon the future or brood much over the
past.

A leaf from the bough above him, loosened by the sun's kisses, dropped,
and fell yellow at his feet. The leaves were turning very soon?

It was characteristic of this man, who could be so hot over the lost
causes of others, that, sitting there within half an hour of the final
loss of his own cause, he could be so calm, so almost apathetic. This
apathy was partly due to the hopelessness, which Nature had long
perceived, of trying to make him feel oppressed, but also to the habits
of a man incurably accustomed to carrying his fortunes in his hand, and
that hand open. It did not seem real to him that he was actually going
to suffer a defeat, to have to confess that he had hankered after this
girl all these past weeks, and that to-morrow all would be wasted, and
she as dead to him as if he had never seen her. No, it was not exactly
resignation, it was rather sheer lack of commercial instinct. If only
this had been the lost cause of another person. How gallantly he would
have rushed to the assault, and taken her by storm! If only he himself
could have been that other person, how easily, how passionately could he
not have pleaded, letting forth from him all those words which had
knocked at his teeth ever since he knew her, and which would have seemed
so ridiculous and so unworthy, spoken on his own behalf. Yes, for that
other person he could have cut her out from under the guns of the enemy;
he could have taken her, that fairest prize. And in queer, cheery-looking
apathy--not far removed perhaps from despair--he sat, watching the leaves
turn over and fall, and now and then cutting with his stick at the air,
where autumn was already riding. And, if in imaginat