Youth, eager, strong, self-confident, with its innocent parted lips, and its steadfast eyes looking out over the future--the drawing stood there as the quintessence, the embodiment, of a whole generation.

So might the young Odysseus have looked when he left his mother on his first journey to hunt the boar with his kinsfolk on Mount Parnassus.

And with such an air had hundreds of thousands of English boys gone out on a deadlier venture since the great war began, with a like intensity of will, a like merry scorn of fate.
Sir Henry was conscious of a lump in his throat.

He had lost his youngest son in the retreat from Mons, and two nephews on the Somme.
'It's wonderful,' he said, not very clearly.

'I envy you such a possession.' The Squire made no reply.