more competent,
more generous, more fearless. He could never be a mystic. He did
not want to be that. But surely he could learn in this interval of
separation which, like a river, divided his life 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