Free Skinny Island by Louis Auchincloss

to decide these matters and that, anyway, the more carnage, the more necessary was the work that even one as puny as himself was performing. He saw unspeakable horrors in the wards that he visited, but he was somewhat consoled by the thought that for every hideous wound there was a courageous heart, that for every act of destruction there was a brave deed of defense, that for every devil there seemed to be an angel. God had a use for every seeming ill.
    Mrs. Perkins herself, erect, immaculate, always in her widow's spotless black, became Marcus's symbol of the civilization that the Hun could never beat, the image of the domination of self. One had to resist the enemy within as well as without; one had to put down fear as well as lust. The world could always be beautiful to one who would not compromise.
    When Mrs. Perkins died, very suddenly, after the armistice, in the flu epidemic, Marcus, awestruck in his grief, wondered if she might not have used up the capital of her fortitude and been ready, perhaps even grateful, to succumb to an efficient and speedy killer. At least she had given him the strength to return to America. It was as if she had said, in her gruff way: "Very well now; I've shown you the way.
Live!
"

    When Marcus returned to Clare, after an absence of six years, he was a very different man from the unhappy and disillusioned creature who had fled to France. His slender shape had so filled out that he was almost stocky, and much of his blond hair had disappeared from his round scalp. He moved deliberately now rather than jerkily; there was something almost magisterial in the dignity of his diminutive figure, swathed in dark brown or black. Marcus had settled upon an image that would last him for the next twenty years and the personality that would go with it.
    He had no favorites now among the boys, although he held small sessions for the especially gifted. There developed a legend that he had once dismissed a class because he seemed on the verge of tears in a lecture on the death of Keats. Rodman Venable had been killed in the war, and it was widely believed that it was Marcus who, in his memory, had paid for the great west window in the chapel that showed Christ with the children. He seemed to have no life outside the school, nor did he ever spend a night away from the tiny Greek Revival villa he had built just off the campus, except for one week every summer with the Forresters in Maine.
    He was satisfied that he had carried the passion for beauty, which in his case was manifested not in music or color or any of the plastic arts but in words alone, words in prose or verse, to the highest and most intense pitch possible for man, and he conceived it his simple and sole duty as a citizen of the world to try to transmit this passion to any individual in the marching regiments of youth who chose to turn aside to receive it. He did not persuade himself that there would be many of these, nor did he greatly care. He was on earth, presumably, to offer a remedy to desperate souls; perhaps they had to be desperate before they sought it. For himself, anyway, he was content that beauty had entered his blood stream to satisfy his every appetite. He did not, like Omar, have any need of a jug of wine or "thou beside me singing in the wilderness"; the book of verses underneath the bough was quite enough for him. Marcus likened himself to the young Alfred de Musset, who was reputed to have swooned away on hearing a couplet in
Phèdre.
    In 1937 there was a sixth former at the school called David Prine, a scholarship boy, ungainly, large, with glossy black hair and rather wild eyes, who was so brilliant that Marcus took him on as a single student in Greek. No one else could keep up with him. Unfortunately, the boy was prone to ask awkward questions.
    One evening, as they discussed Plato, Prine brought up Jowett's change of genders in translating the
Symposium,
making some of the "he's" "she's."
    "How could he justify it,