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Well, it was what Stacey himself had told his father. But he hadn’t perceived all that it meant. That was what you got for being impressionistic instead of thorough, he told himself humbly.

Blair turned his eyes back slowly to his friend. “And that,” he concluded, his thin face drawn with an expression of pain, “is why—though I know you’ve got to do it, and though I’d do it too, if I had the bodily health—that is why I feel, above all, grief that you must throw yourself into that inferno of awful physical and worse mental suffering. Forgive me!” he cried remorsefully.

But the shadow that had come over Stacey’s face was not there because of the prophecy of pain. Stacey was thinking of the contrast between Philip’s words and Marian’s. “That’s all right, Phil,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t what you said that bothered me. It was something else. Of course I know what I’m going into—so far as one can know through his imagination about something totally outside his experience. It’s a great deal better to think of it beforehand and be ready.”