sia, how strange that she, the product of the most
modern and presumably enlightened age, should linger there amidst
these broken walls, and feel strange kinship and fascination about
those old people in that remote age; should stretch a hand out to
them, as it were, across the centuries, with this feeling that their
thoughts had been even as her thoughts, and that the passing of the
ages could never eradicate the essential likeness of one people to
another in those old eternal questions of whence and why and
wherefore.

And they, the maidens of that day, had loved the man who was big and
strong and true, even as the maidens of to-day; the man who achieved;
who was ever fearless to do and dare; who gave his service to the
world quietly, unostentatiously, indifferent to praise or reward. And
what was the use of it all: the love, the heartache, the silent
admiration.... The maidens were dust now, and all the strength and the
heroism of the strong men could not give them one age longer to do and
dare ere they too made room for others.

Yet always--always--deep-rooted in the heart and mind of humanity, was
this ineradicable belief in the simple act of _doing_; this
half-contempt of the lives content to flutter their little way in
aimless self-seeking. The spirit that took men through the terrible
solitudes of untrodden places, that urged them across uncharted seas,
that carried them fearlessly aloft to conquer the air--not for gain,
not for notoriety, not for praise, but just that simple splendid need
to be _doing_. How it appealed to her, how it enthralled her senses,
how it made her ache with a great overwhelming desire to discover
quickly what "doing" in a big sense there might be for her!

Of course he, the stern soldier-policeman, was of the fearless band.
In his quiet way he was "doing" with the foremost, though it might be
a work that would never bring him anything in this world but enough
pay just to live upon. But that was beside the point. The band to
which he belonged did not linger in the shallows, counting the cost,
counting the gain; they plunged straightway into the deep waters, and
struggled to some mysterious, perhaps fugitive, goal ahead, finding
their reward in the struggle itself and the difficult headway won.

And afterwards!...

O, what did it matter about afterwards, if one had put up a good fight
and dared the deep waters? How much better to be overwhelmed there,
than to fritter away a butterfl