reality. It was not a
lack of intelligence; it seemed rather to be the machinery of
intelligence rusted and clogged from long disuse. He deliberated long
before he spoke. It took him some time to understand things. Speech did
not come to him readily, and he became easily confused in the matter of
words. Once, suddenly, he had interrupted her, breaking out with:

"Oh, the smell of the trees, of the grass! Isn't it wonderful; isn't it
wonderful?" And a few seconds later, quite irrelevantly: "And, after
all, we failed."

At once Lloyd was all aroused, defending him against himself.

"Failed! And you say that? If you did not reach the Pole, what then? The
world will judge you by results perhaps, and the world's judgment will
be wrong. Is it nothing that you have given the world an example of
heroism--"

"Oh, don't call it that."

"Of heroism, of courage, of endurance? Is it nothing that you have
overcome obstacles before which other men would have died? Is it nothing
that you have shown us all how to be patient, how to be strong? There
are some things better even than reaching the Pole. To suffer and be
calm is one of them; not to give up--never to be beaten--is another. Oh,
if I were a man! Ten thousand, a hundred thousand people are reading
to-night of what you have done--of what you have done, you understand,
not of what you have failed to do. They have seen--you have shown them
what the man can do who says _I will_, and you have done a little more,
have gone a little further, have been a little braver, a little hardier,
a little nobler, a little more determined than any one has ever been
before. Whoever fails now cannot excuse himself by saying that he has
done as much as a man can do. He will have to remember the men of the
Freja. He will have to remember you. Don't you suppose I am proud of
you; don't you suppose that I am stronger and better because of what you
have done? Do you think it is nothing for me to be sitting here beside
you, here in this park--to be--yes, to be with you? Can't you
understand? Isn't it something to me that you are the man you are; not
the man whose name the people are shouting just now, not the man to whom
a king gave a bit of ribbon and enamel, but the man who lived like a
man, who would not die just because it was easier to die than to live,
who fought like a man, not only for himself but for the lives of those
he led, who showed us all how to be strong, and how strong one could be