Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
She found one afternoon in a twopenny book-box, with which she was
trying to allay her craving for purchases, a tattered little pamphlet
entitled: "Proposals for the Establishment of an Order of Samurai,"
which fell in very exactly with her mood. The title "dated"; it carried
her mind back to her middle girlhood and the defeats of Kuropatki and
the futile earnest phase in English thought which followed the Boer War.
The order was to be a sort of self-appointed nobility serving the world.
It shone with the light of a generous dawn, but cast, I fear, the shadow
of the prig. Its end was the Agenda Club.... She read and ceased to
read--and dreamt.
The project unfolded the picture of a new method of conduct to her,
austere, yet picturesque and richly noble. These Samurai, it was
intimated, were to lead lives of hard discipline and high effort, under
self-imposed rule and restraint. They were to stand a little apart from
the excitements and temptations of everyday life, to eat sparingly,
drink water, resort greatly to self-criticism and self-examination, and
harden their spirits by severe and dangerous exercises. They were to
dress simply, work hard, and be the conscious and deliberate salt of the
world. They were to walk among mountains. Incidentally, great power was
to be given them. Such systematic effort and self-control as this,
seemed to Marjorie to give just all she wasn't and needed to be, to save
her life and Trafford's from a common disaster....
It particularly appealed to her that they were to walk among
mountains....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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