Page:Lay down your arms - the autobiography of Martha von Tilling.djvu/185

Rh capacity to feel beyond a certain level of compassion, yet one may be capable of thinking and computing that one has an inconceivable quantity of woe before one."

"You, and one or two others may be capable, but the majority of men neither think nor compute."

I succeeded in moving Frederick to the resolve of quitting the service. The circumstance that he had, after his marriage, served now more than a year, and taken a distinguished part in a campaign, would defend him from the suspicion which had occurred to my father during our engagement, that the whole marriage had for its object only to enable him to give up his career. Now, when peace should once be made, the preliminaries of which were in train, and when to all probability there were long years of peace in prospect, retirement from the army would now not involve anything dishonourable. It was, indeed, still, to some extent, repugnant to Frederick's pride to give up his rank and income, and, as he said, "to do nothing, to be nothing, and to have nothing," but his love for me was with him an even more powerful feeling than his pride, and he could not resist my entreaties. I declared that I could not go through a second time the anguish of mind which his last parting caused me; and he himself might well shrink from again calling down on us both such pain. The feeling of delicacy, which, before his marriage with me, made him shrink from the idea of living on the fortune of a rich woman, no longer came into play, for we had become so completely one that there was no longer any perceptible difference between "mine" and "yours," and we understood each other so well that no misjudgment of his character on my part was any longer to be feared. The last campaign had besides so greatly increased his aversion to the murderous duties of war, and his unqualified expression of that aversion had so rooted it in him, that his retirement got to appear not like a concession made to our domestic happiness so much as the putting into action of his own intention, as a tribute to his convictions, and so he promised