"What a wife she is!" he reflected enviously after she was gone; and he
tried not to think of certain matters in her life. "What a wife! How
unfaltering in duty!"
The next time she came, it was early. She seemed to him to have bathed in
the freshness, the beauty, the delight of the morning. He had never seen her
so radiant, so young. She was like a woman who holds in her hand the
unopened casket of life--its jewels still ungazed on, still unworn. There
was some secret excitement in her as though the moment had at last come for
her to open it. She had but a few moments to spare.
"I have brought you a book," she said, smiling and laying her cheek against
a rose newly placed by his Testament. For a moment she scrutinized him with
intense penetration. Then she added: "Will you read it wisely?"
"I will if I am wise," he replied laughing. "Thank you," and he held out his
hand for the book eagerly.
She clasped it more tightly with the gayest laugh of irresolution. Her
colour deepened. A moment later, however, she recovered the simple and noble
seriousness to which she had grown used as the one habit of her life with
him.
"You should have read it long ago," she said. "But it is not too late for
you. Perhaps now is your best time. It is a good book for a man, wounded as
you have been; and by the time you are well, you will need it more than you
have ever done. Hereafter you will always need it more."
She spoke with partly hidden significance, as one who knows life may speak
to one who does not.
He eyed the book despairingly.
"It is my old Bible of manhood," she continued with rich soberness, " part
worthless, part divine. Not Greek manhood--nor Roman manhood: they were too
pagan. Not Semitic manhood: that--in its ideal at least--was not pagan
enough. But something better than any of these--something that is
everything."
The subject struck inward to the very heart's root of his private life. He
listened as with breath arrested.
"We know what the Greeks were before everything else," she said resolutely:
" hey were physical men: we think less of them spiritually in any sense of
the idea that is valued by us and of course we do not think of them at all
as gentlemen: that involves of course the highest courtesy to women. The
Jews were of all things spiritual in the type of their striving. Their
ancient system, and the system of the New Testament itself as it was soon
taught and passed down to us, struck a deadly blow at the development of the
body for its own sake--at physical beauty: and the highest development of
the body is what the race can never do without. It struck another blow at
the development of taste--at the luxury and grace of the intellect: which
also the race can never do without. But in this old book you will find the
starting-point of a new conception of ideal human life. It grew partly out
of the pagan; it grew partly out of the Christian; it added from its own age
something of its own. Nearly every nation of Europe has lived on it ever
since--as its ideal. The whole world is being nourished by that ideal more
and more. It is the only conception of itself that the race can never fall
away from without harm, because it is the ideal of its own perfection. You
know what I mean?" she asked a little imperiously as though she were talking
to a green boy.