"The longer I live the more I am certain that the great difference between men—between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy, invincible determination—a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory. That quality will do anything that can be done in this world; and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two-legged creature a man without it."—SIR F. FOWELL BUXTON. "I have been sitting here with my pen in my hand, wondering how to find words in which to tell you what really happened at that awful scene in the House of Commons," Lady Wereminster wrote to Hare next day, with shaking hand. "I want to put it all down in plain English, to make myself see the main facts more clearly—at present my whole vision seems blurred and vague. I now know something of what women felt when they stood outside a door and knew that within the room their husbands were being racked. One of my nieces was out in South Africa during the war, you know. She told me that one of the most terrible things she saw was a man, a common soldier, in one of the hospitals at Kimberley, who had been wounded by expanding bullets in the hand between the thumb and forefinger, and in the thigh. Both, under ordinary conditions, would have been mere flesh-wounds; as things were, the space between the forefinger and thumb had swollen as high as a muscular man’s arm, and the wound in the thigh was in the same condition. But the man could not die, and medical convention prevented his doctor from putting him out of pain. He lingered on, to Mary’s knowledge, in agony, from the battle of Roidam, which took place on the fifth of May, until she left Kimberley on the thirty-first of the month. Throughout that time he had not even momentary cessation from torture. And when she went away the doctor told her that the man’s vitality was such that he might well last a fortnight longer. "A fortnight—think! Remembrance of that suffering man flashed back to me the other night in the House. Nobody likes having to see physical pain; as for mental pain, the only way we treat it is to slur it over. Like St. Thomas, we can only understand wounds we can put our fingers into and probe.