ONE:In the end these stories of the soldiers convinced even the inhabitants that there had been francs-tireurs, but never in the place where they lived, always somewhere else. They could not believe that the Germans could be so cruel and wreck so much property if nothing at all had happened; and when at length the time came that they themselves were obliged to fly, many of them believed that their compatriots who elsewhere acted as francs-tireurs were to blame for all the dire calamities. But if they had had my opportunity to go "elsewhere" and gather information there, they would have been convinced of the untruth, and probably would have heard the name of their own village as90 the scene of the occurrence. That was how rumours and reports got about.Bruce could say nothing. At every turn of this mystery it seemed to grow more tangled and knotted. He waited until the two had passed into the roadway; he heard the exchange of goodnights, and then the cab rattled away. Balmayne came back and looked quite carelessly into the library. Hetty had already stepped out of the side door and had gone up to her room. She had no desire for Balmayne to know that she had been with Bruce.
ONE:Plutarch, who was twenty-one when Nero declared his country free, was the first leader in the great Hellenist revival, without, at the same time, entirely belonging to it. He cared more for the matter than for the form of antiquity, for the great deeds and greater thoughts of the past than for the words in which they were related and explained. Hence, by the awkwardness and heaviness of his style, he is more akin to the writers of the Alexandrian period than to his immediate successors. On the one side, he opens the era of classical idealism; on the other, he closes that of encyclopaedic erudition. The next generation bore much the same relation to Plutarch that the first Sophists bore to Hecataeus and Herodotus. Addressing themselves to popular audiences, they were obliged to study perspicuity and elegance of expression, at the risk, it is true, of verbosity and platitude. Such men were Dion Chrysostom, Her?des Atticus, Maximus Tyrius, and Aristeides. But the old models were imitated with more success by writers who lived more entirely in the past. Arrian reproduced the graceful simplicity270 of Xenophon in his narrative of the campaigns of Alexander and his reports of the lectures of Epicttus. Lucian composed dialogues ranking with the greatest masterpieces of lighter Attic literature. The felicity of his style and his complete emancipation from superstition may probably be traced to the same sourcea diligent study of the ancient classics. It is certain that neither as a writer nor as a critic does he represent the average educated taste of his own times. So far from giving polytheism its deathblow, as he was formerly imagined to have done, he only protested unavailingly against its restoration.Charlton nodded. He was a man of few words. He said nothing when Lawrence gave him a pair of goloshes to put over his boots, and in silence the two set out for Raven Street. The place was practically deserted as they came to the house, so that to enter without being seen was a matter of no difficulty.
ONE:CHAPTER XXXVI. SCREW-CUTTING.
