"Pouff! I'll make cogs and spindles of them. Kitagira, show this young man thence he came, and send Hidetada hither; I am satisfied; either of you have more brains than pluck; the sword is master, and not a balancer. Hence; and let me strike while the blood yet runs hot; I have neither time to wait nor patience to woe a goddess that isn't mine; Ozaka must fall." "I thank you for the entertainment, also for losing your head, horonable host," vouchsafed Hideyori, in parting; "the former, because it is meet to respect gray hairs: the latter, that honest men may make due defense. You need not spare Kitagira, or his kind, for escort; a newer generation makes it possible for me to leave here, not as you once entered there--in a woman's palanquin--but as the defender of my own fortune, and the builder of a nation's hope--both the usefulness and the sacredness of mothers: no less their motherhood." Hideyori withdrew, the more a man, if such had been his failing. His elder at arms and with diplomacy, had thrown to the winds all the finer notions that the younger had been taught about man's province and woman's part. Look as he would into the fading realities of a living yesterday, adjure from scenes imagined against the dawning to-morrow as he did, the one thought that man is a free agent and beholding only to the God that lives within drove him toward his destiny like the thundering waters of a mighty gorge leap and laugh their way to the calm and peace always lying somewhere in the untimed, but certain beyond. And as he tramped along, looking to the right and to the left, there appeared myriads of living atoms answering to the same call that so eagerly gladdened his step, and when the sun burst through, upon these, their faces turned heavenward--only the dead and unborn failed a natural appeal, Amaterasu had written Ieyasu down, and the younger man hastened to accept the responsibility. "Woman a slave to man, men the creature of state, and the state no better than a mechanism? Hearken not the vulture, but to arms: Christ died upon the cross; let these hills and valleys grow green in the blood of Hideyori; a mother's will and not a father's way is the final test of a beginningless God." Harunaga had taught him better than Yodogima believed; there lay behind his spirit an abiding distaste for anything and everything smacking of unearned felicity; the getting of something by sufferance were a crime; profit at the expense of some other man's effort betokened inanity; the trading of wares or of benefits lay beneath him; commercialism was robbery, and diplomacy worse; deception belonged to the devil, and God had always won, must always win.