"But even so, Ernestine," said Georgia, who had been looking it over carefully, "there's no real glory. When I fall down on an assignment, I fall down, and that's all there is to it--at least my city editor thinks so. If Dr. Parkman doesn't win a case, he loses it. His efforts may have been very worthy--but gloria's surely not the word for them. Or take a football game," she laughed. "Sometimes the defeated team really does better work than the winners--but wouldn't we rather our fellows would win on a fluke than go down to defeat putting up a good, steady fight? The thing is to _get there!_" "In football or in life," laughed Karl. "Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to _us._" They were all looking at the bronze and Ernestine looked from one face to another, trying to understand why it moved none of them as it had her. Karl's face was very purposeful tonight, reflecting the stimulus of his talk with his friend. Filled with enthusiasm for this fight he was making, he had no eye in this hour for the triumph of the vanquished. "Why I don't want to submit," he laughed just then. "I want to win!" "An idea which has done a great deal of harm," observed Dr. Parkman. "That 'you'll-get-your-reward-somewhere-else' doctrine is the worst possible armour for life. The poets, of course, have always coddled the weak, but I see more poetry in the to-hell-with-defeat spirit myself." That too she could understand--a simple matter of the arrogance of the successful. And with Georgia it was that thing of "getting there"--the world's hard and fast standards of success and failure. She too turned to the statue. Were they right, and she wrong? Was it just the art of it, the effectiveness, which moved her, and was the thought back of it indeed weakening sentimentality? "Defend it, Ernestine," laughed Karl; and then, affectionately, seeing her seriousness, "Tell us what _you_ see in it." Dr. Parkman turned from the statue to her. He never forgot her face as it was then. He had decided during the evening that her great charm was her exquisite femininity; she seemed to have all those graces of both mind and body which make for perfect loving. It was the world force of love, splendidly manifest in gentleness, he had felt in her first. But now something new flamed up within her. Here was power--power moving in the waves of passion through the channel of understanding. Her face had grown fairly stern in its insistence.