“Lancelot was a sadist who refrained from hurting people through his sense of honour - his Word. His Word was his promise to be gentle, and it was one of the things that made him the Best Knight in the World. 'All through his life,' [T.H.] White wrote of Lancelot, 'even when he was a great man with the world at his feet - he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand.' White always took great pains to be gentle precisely because he wanted to be cruel. It was why he never beat his pupils at Stowe.”
Book:H is for Hawk