Throughout the past night’s ride along the solitary road Alkibiades had spoken no word. His companion could not see his face. There was that within him for which no words of human language have been found. For all his faults—and by this time those who have followed his career thus far may perhaps think he had some,—there lay beneath them all a well of generosity. Among the varying qualities which went to make up that mixture of divergent sentiments which we call his character was an overwhelming, innate love of justice. When that was outraged, there arose within him the deadliest and most enduring desire for revenge. He enjoyed life enormously, and had that keen pleasure in the mere consciousness of being, which others, less gifted, cannot imagine, and he wished that all other men should enjoy their lives. He loved his ease, his happiness, his indulgences; he wished that others should be happy; the idea of happiness was, for the most part at that time, confused with pleasure and indulgence. But above all this there was a loathing of, a nervous shrinking from, anything which in any way could be regarded by anyone as a taint of cowardice. ‘I would rather die than be a coward,’ he had once said to Sokrates while he was an ardent, dreamy boy. These are nearly the first words we find recorded of him. When he once saw another boy of nearly twice his size taking by force a smaller boy’s playthings from him, he rushed at him in such fury that he had thrashed and smashed him before the bully had recovered from his astonishment. It was this generous love of right as much as his extraordinary gifts of intellect and beauty and excellence in all manly exercises which had made him an uncrowned king among the boys of Athens, and would have left him king of men throughout his life had not the spirit of injustice been too strong for him. And now, as he rode silently through the dark night to Teichioussa, his wrongs came over him in their intense reality. It was only the old determination still—to die rather than be, or be thought to be, a coward—which prevented their weight from overpowering him. It was not vindictiveness. You may call it pride, vanity, spirit of revenge, or what you will, but it was rather a burning sense of wrong, whenever he found that wrong was being done, and a determination to set it right; a determination to be stopped by nothing till he should have conquered the injustice, at whatever cost; a stubborn resolve to set himself right in the eyes of men—this is what has been mistaken in him for vindictiveness, and by those who have not read his character below the surface, for selfishness and vanity. In fact, when a great deed was to be done, however much it clashed with self-interest and vanity, no one showed a greater disregard of self than he did.