young men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but
all intensely desiring to have me--to own this rather
magnificent proud tradition I'd built up round me. Do you see?"

"Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized."

"Never!"

She sprang to the edge, poised for a moment like a crucified
figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked
without a slash between two silver ripples twenty feet below.

Her voice floated up to him again.

"And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist
that comes down on life--not only overriding people and
circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of
insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient
things."

She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the
damp yellow hair slicked symmetrically back appeared on his
level.

"All very well," objected Carlyle. "You can call it courage, but
your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You
were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage
is one of the things that's gray and lifeless."

She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing