apologetically, feeling compelled to say the best she could for her
husband's guest. "I don't care for him much myself, to be sure, but
Robert likes him. And he's awfully nice, every one says, to his
wife and step-children."

"How CAN he be very good," Bertram answered in his gentlest voice,
"if he hires himself out indiscriminately to kill or maim whoever
he's told to, irrespective even of the rights and wrongs of the
private or public quarrel he happens to be employed upon? It's an
appalling thing to take a fellow-creature's life, even if you're
quite, quite sure it's just and necessary; but fancy contracting to
take anybody's and everybody's life you're told to, without any
chance even of inquiring whether they may not be in the right after
all, and your own particular king or people most unjust and cruel
and blood-stained aggressors? Why, it's horrible to contemplate.
Do you know, Mrs. Monteith," he went on, with his far-away air,
"it's that that makes society here in England so difficult to me.
It's so hard to mix on equal terms with your paid high priests and
your hired slaughterers, and never display openly the feelings you
entertain towards them. Fancy if you had to mix so yourself with
the men who flogged women to death in Hungary, or with the
governors and jailors of some Siberian prison! That's the worst of
travel. When I was in Central Africa, I sometimes saw a poor black
woman tortured or killed before my very eyes; and if I'd tried to
interfere in her favour, to save or protect her, I'd only have got
killed myself, and probably have made things all the worse in the
end for her. And yet it's hard indeed to have to look on at, or
listen to, such horrors as these without openly displaying one's
disgust and disapprobation. Whenever I meet your famous generals,
or your judges and your bishops, I burn to tell them how their acts