Now,"--and
she laughed lightly,--"I have made a most serious confession."
"It is a new idea--that of surveying the ages from these mountains. They
must be very wise after all these years, and they have certainly seen men
and nations do many evil and wretched things. But the history of the
world is all one long romance--a tremendous story."
"That is what makes me sorry to go home," said Shirley meditatively. "We
are so new--still in the making, and absurdly raw. When we have a war, it
is just politics, with scandals about what the soldiers have to eat, and
that sort of thing; and there's a fuss about pensions, and the heroic
side of it is lost."
"But it is easy to overestimate the weight of history and tradition. The
glory of dead Caesar doesn't do the peasant any good. When you see
Italian laborers at work in America digging ditches or laying railroad
ties, or find Norwegian farmers driving their plows into the new hard
soil of the Dakotas, you don't think of their past as much as of their
future--the future of the whole human race."
Armitage had been the subject of so much jesting between Dick and herself
that it seemed strange to be talking to him.
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