CHAPTER XVIIThe report that Angelica brought back from St. Elmo was satisfactory enough; though, had she seen others of the garrison, she might have met with some who would have talked in a different tone.
But, indeed, De Broglio’s matter-of-course attitude (which treated death as a daily event of no more consequence than a meal) may have been of even greater avail than the higher ideality of D’Egueras (who would talk of the surrender of life as of a supreme sacrifice in a sacred cause) in giving courage and confidence to the heroic company of those who looked up the long slope of Sceberras to the hundred-fold assembly of their pitiless and implacable foe. And even to say that De Broglio was deficient in ideality is to go beyond proof, he being of those who will never speak of themselves,
