there be hesitation?

And I would warn our sentimentalists to admit the nose among the features
proper to heroes, otherwise the race will become extinct. There is
already an amount of dropping of the curtain that is positively
wearisome, even to extremely refined persons, in order to save him from
apparent misconduct. He will have to go altogether, unless we boldly
figure him as other men. Manifestly the moment his career as a fairy
prince was at end, he was on the high road to a nose. The beneficent
Power that discriminated for him having vanished utterly, he was, like a
bankrupt gentleman, obliged to do all the work for himself. This is
nothing more than the tendency of the generations downward from the
ideal.

The springs that moved Wilfrid upon the present occasion were simple. We
will strip him of his heroic trappings for one fleeting instant, and show
them.

Jumping briskly from a restless bed, his first act was to address his
features to the looking-glass: and he saw surely the most glorious sight
for a hero of the knightly age that could possibly have been offered.
The battle of the previous night was written there in one eloquent big
lump, which would have passed him current as hero from end to end of the
land in the great days of old. These are the tea-table days. His
preference was for the visage of Wilfrid Pole, which he saw not. At the
aspect of the fearful mask, this young man stared, and then cursed; and
then, by an odd transition, he was reminded, as by the force of a sudden
gust, that Emilia's hair was redolent of pipe-smoke.

His remark was, "I can't be seen in this state." His thought (a dim