I looked away. Dusk was falling, the white peaks like spirits.... I had not seen his face again, but it suddenly came to me how it had looked when I saw it before--that which was the bravest and most beautiful face that I knew in manhood--how it had been beaten and bruised under the boots of running peasants--crushed into the mire by the feet of the men he loved so well. For a moment, I was in the red world of rage that this should be, but then the mighty drama of it came nearer, the supreme laughing art of it all--that only the saviours call to them. And I smiled, looking away to the dusk falling on the cold mountains--and I knew that my friend's spirit was as close to us as the body she held against her breast.... Then back in the bivouacs a song began--the men of two armies roaring out a song of the great white democracy of the future.... * * * * * 27 RÉSUMÉ The end of Varsieff is satisfying to us, and yet I wonder if I can make this sort of romance clear. Martyrdom--they call it a short cut. There is a saying that the soul of a man who dies for something, goes marching on. The Irish become hopeless of their cause, if some one dies for the opposition. All revolutionists have reckoned with this subtlety--no propaganda like martyrdom; all the sacred writings refer to it, our Bible several times, once in the sentence, "Greater love hath no man----" A deluge of phenomena from "the other side" has come in during the present war, all the old martyrs of nationalism said to be called to the cause of their empires.... What is the romantic haunt that lifts a man to such a pitch of exaltation that he transcends pain, and goes singing down to die? These are matters much better known among the young dreamers and workers of Russia and the Orient than of America.... Varsieff reveals the child under the man of action; the lover above the intellectualist. His love story unfolds certain passages which we are making a point of in these chapters. The woman, Paula Mantone, represents a loved type in our sort of story-making. She brings, vaguely, at least, into terms the romantic ideal so calling to us in these days. She means more than three-score and ten. Her love goes on and on. She becomes a priestess, in a sense, and conducts her lover through the critical passage of finding his own Soul. External battles then take his body, but she is not altogether bereft. An intuitional woman does not always know what she is doing in her heart story, even when she does greatly. If the physical action had broken different, if the body of Varsieff had not been required in martyrdom, for instance, he might have emerged from the final stress of action in a state of spiritual exaltation, from which, I can imagine Paula Mantone calling him back to the gardens of the senses.... Martyr, priestess, revoltee, but always a woman. Every year of devotion to the feminine in fiction, compels a more fluid, yet more mystic handling.