that he has had the long habit of talking to her thus, so that now he
does it easily and without restraint. He tells her the deepest thoughts
of his mind, knowing that she will understand them better than any one
else. That foreboding which the mother felt about her baby in Morris's
poem has never come true about him:

'Lo, here thy body beginning, O son, and thy soul and thy life,
But how will it be if thou livest and enterest into the strife,
And in love we dwell together when the man is grown in thee,
When thy sweet speech I shall hearken, and yet 'twixt thee and me
Shall rise that wall of distance that round each one doth grow,
And maketh it hard and bitter each other's thought to know?'

This son has lived and entered into the strife indeed; but the wall of
distance has not grown round him; and, as we read these letters, we
think that no French mother would fear the natural estrangement which
that English mother in the poem fears. The foreboding itself seems to
belong to a barbaric society in which there is a more animal division of
the sexes, in which the male fears to become effeminate if he does not
insist upon his masculinity even to his mother. But this Frenchman has
left barbarism so far behind that he is not afraid of effeminacy; nor
does he need to remind himself that he is a male. There is a philosophy
to which this forgetfulness of masculinity is decadence. According to
that philosophy, man must remember always that he is an animal, a proud
fighting animal like a bull or a cock; and the proudest of all fighting
animals, to be admired at a distance by all women unless he condescends
to desire them, is the officer. No one could be further from such a
philosophy than this Frenchman; he is so far from it that he does not
seem even to be aware of its existence. He hardly mentions the Germans
and never expresses anger against them. The worst he says of them almost