Commonplace Book

'...There is a current idea that when men or women give up all for the sake of conscience, they are respectively warmed and cheered by the flames of their sacrifice and the light of their haloes; but experience teaches that this is rarely the case. When human beings have put aside their humanity for a moment and allowed the Divinity that is inherent in every man to settle their affairs for them, the humanity which they have temporarily suppressed is apt to take it out of them sooner or later; and in consequence there is considerable reaction, accompanied by no small amount of irritability. As least this is generally the case in modern times; and it is doubtful if even the martyrs of old - between the turns of the thumbscrew - were really pleasant company. In this world people are never all white or all black; we are most of us merely grey, or, at best, shepherd's plaid, so that there are both black and white places in us which come to the front in turn, unless we happen to be women - in which case we are made of a shot material, and so are actually both black and white at one and the same moment.'

from Place and Power by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Book II, Chapter VI)