Page:Hare and Tortoise (1925).pdf/70

 whether the gaining of the citadel were worth the trampling down of fields, the possible breaking of church windows, the discomfort to neutral bystanders.

At such moments he suspected that he was in the wrong camp; that he had been led there through his admiration for daring spirits rather than a desire for the victory they coveted. It alarmed him to discover that the topsy-turvy fancies that had endeared Louise to him were not merely playful. It alarmed him to discover that she was ready to put her most daring theories into practise, ready to regard her own thoughts and emotions as so many elements in a laboratory in which she was free to experiment, in scientific earnest, at the risk of explosions and bad odors, all for the sake of arriving at truths that would be of questionable value. Certainly, to Keble's mind, the potential results, should the experiments be never so successful, were not worth the incidental damage,—not where one's wife was concerned. For him "safe and sane" meant the avoidance of risk. For Louise he suspected that "safe and sane" smacked of unwillingness to take the personal risks inevitable in any conquest of truth. That brought him to the consideration of "truth," and he saw that for him truth was something more tangible, and much nearer home, than it was for his wife. And he was in the lamentable situation of feeling that she was right, yet being constitutionally unable, or unwilling, or afraid, to go in her direction.