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Now that Sir Henry had once perceived the drawing it seemed to him
to light up the whole place. The dress was the dress of the Eton
Eleven; there was just a suggestion of pale blue in the sash round
the waist. But the whole impression was Greek in its manly freedom
and beauty; above all in its sacrifice of all useless detail to one
broad and simple effect. Youth, eager, strong, self-confident, with
its innocent parted lips, and its steadfast eyes looking out over
the future--the drawing stood there as the quintessence, the
embodiment, of a whole generation. So might the young Odysseus have
looked when he left his mother on his first journey to hunt the boar
with his kinsfolk on Mount Parnassus. And with such an air had
hundreds of thousands of English boys gone out on a deadlier venture
since the great war began, with a like intensity of will, a like
merry scorn of fate.
Sir Henry was conscious of a lump in his throat. He had lost his
youngest son in the retreat from Mons, and two nephews on the Somme.


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