“Pas du tout, Madame—your son is correct. Regarde!” Beyond the gyrating trees looms McGill University’s hospital. “I’d make an excellent subject for surgeons to use while instructing their students about anatomy. Not a morsel of fat would obscure their view of my muscle, bones, or internal organs.”

The woman’s hair is the tan of whipped chestnuts, like Eliza Lawson’s. She’d have startled me with her resemblance were she slightly taller. Sophie says my own thin, tall body attracted me to Miss Lawson, who was taller than all the women around her and very slender. Sophie calls this lovers’ narcissism—says it happens all the time. Couples do mirror-service to each other in the name of love, or what they mistake for love. Love is not love at all, Sophie says, if you’re only admiring yourself in a glass.

The mother continues to chide her boy far too much, and I hasten to persuade them both I’ve not taken offence. “If I suffered every time even beloved friends comment on how thin I am I’d be perpetually aggrieved! Besides, I’ve never been vain.”

I’m an idiot. What could be vainer than professing freedom from vanity? “What I mean is, it takes a particular sort of shame to cause me grief….”

God help a general who starts worrying how civilians might judge his decisions. I’ve rooted such sensitivity out of myself. But personal shame over moral matters is different. Real shame stems from dishonouring a mother or a lover or a friend—I dread that kind of shame more than I love life….

Where has the woman gone?

Is that her on the far side of the street? Is that her little boy running ahead of her to the Australian pie shop? And am I mad—talking to myself again about the difference between a soldier and an ordinary man?

“The personal, smaller shame is really the larger,” I explain to the number 80 bus, whose engine drowns my argument as it labours uphill. “A soldier has a uniform to identify him. He has flags and drums, dye and hide—boisterous, deafening! We had red coats not only because red dye was cheap, but to make us forget how delicate we were; the faint blue of a young man’s veins.”

Was there a poet among us? Had one of us made harpsichords in his village? Did we harbour a tapestry-weaver? Was I a fluteplayer who loved dogs?

No. None of us was any longer the man he had been.

But now, I see the opposite impulse everywhere: such aggrandizement of personal sentiment. Does no one understand larger duty?

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