ely is the master passion. Nothing else can annihilate the
ego."

Laurens, who had performed prodigies of valour, sighed heavily. "I felt
as you did while the engagement lasted," he replied. "But I went into
the battle with exultation, for death this time seemed inevitable. And
the only result is a headache. What humiliation!"

"You are morbid, my dear," said Hamilton, tenderly. "You cannot persuade
me that at the age of twenty-five naught remains but death--no matter
what mistakes one may have made. There is always the public career--for
which you are eminently fitted. I would begin life over again twenty
times if necessary."

"Yes, because you happen to be a man of genius. I am merely a man of
parts. There are many such. Not only is my life ruined, but every day I
despair anew of ever attaining that high ideal of character I have set
for myself. I want nothing short of perfection," he said passionately.
"Could I attain that, I should be content to live, no matter how
wretched. But I fall daily. My passions control me, my hatreds, my
impulses of the moment. When a man's very soul aches for a purity which
it is in man to attain if he will, and when he is daily reminded that he
is but a whimperer at the feet of the statue, the world is no place for
him."

"Laurens," said Hamilton, warmly, "you refine on the refinements of
sensibility. You have brooded until you no longer are normal and capable
of logic. Compare your life with that of most men, and hope. You are but
twenty-five, and you have won a deathless glory, by a valour and
brilliancy on these battlefields that no one else has approached. Your
brain and accomplishments are such that the country looks to you as one
of its future guides. Your character is that of a Bayard. It is your
passions alone, my dear, which save you from being a prig. Passion is
the furnace that makes greatness possible. If, when the mental energies
are resting, it darts out tongues of flame that strike in the wrong
place, I do not believe that the Almighty, who made us, counts them as
sins. They are natural outlets, and we should burst without them. If one
of those tongues of flame was the cause of your undoing, God knows you
have paid in kind. As a rule no one is the worse, while most are better.
A certain degree of perfection we can attain, but absolute
perfection--go into a wilderness like Mohammed and fast. There is no
other way, and even then you merely would have visions; you would n