Then the Household Brigade went up and carried the breach, leaving a
third of their number on it. The general in command made the whole army
defile past their _guidon_, and salute it with sloped standards.
"No; very few men are physical cowards in battle, whatever they may be
across country. I don't believe Paris was, when he ran from Menelaues;
and Helen did not think so, though she teased him about it, or she would
never have spoken to him again. I rather imagine his feeling was that of
a certain Guardsman of our acquaintance, who said, declining the ordeal
of combat, that 'his first duty was to his partners, and this did not
allow him to risk a black eye.'"
"Might not remorse at the sight of the man he had injured have had
something to do with his flight?" Bruce asked.
He was full of moral sentiments--that man; only you could not look at
him without fancying that they sprung more from an inclination to be
contradictious and disagreeable than from any depth of principle.
"Absurd," Guy retorted. "Wasn't he a heathen, and rather an immoral one?
It was of profligates with far greater advantages of education that some
one said, '_'Le remords nait de l'abandon, et non de la faute_.
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