a special bent, with the strain and absorption it implies, gave the boy his peculiar charm. The trouble was that it made him the prey of other people’s plans for him. And now all these plans—Campton’s dreams for the future as well as the business arrangements which were Mr. Brant’s contribution—might be wrecked by to-morrow’s news from Berlin. The possibility still seemed unthinkable; but in spite of his incredulity the evil shadow hung on him as he and his son chatted of political issues.

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George made no allusion to his own case: his whole attitude was so dispassionate that his father began to wonder if he had not solved the question by concluding 32that he would not pass the medical examination. The tone he took was that the whole affair, from the point of view of twentieth-century civilization, was too monstrous an incongruity for something not to put a stop to it at the eleventh hour. His easy optimism at first stimulated his father, and then began to jar on him.

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“Dastrey doesn’t think it can be stopped,” Campton said at length.

The boy smiled.

“Dear old Dastrey! No, I suppose not. That after-Sedan generation have got the inevitability of war in their bones. They’ve never been able to get beyond it. Our whole view is different: we’re internationals, whether we want to be or not.”

“To begin with, if by ‘our’ view you mean yours and mine, you and I haven’t a drop of French blood in us,” his father interposed, “and we can never really know what the French feel on such matters.”

George looked at him affectionately. “Oh, but I didn’t—I meant ‘we’ in the sense of my generation, of whatever nationality. I know French chaps who feel as I do—Louis Dastrey, Paul’s nephew, for one; and lots of English ones. They don’t believe the world will ever stand for another war. It’s too stupidly uneconomic, to begin with: I suppose you’ve read Angell? Then life’s worth too much, and nowadays too many millions of people know it. That’s the way we all feel. 33Think of everything that counts—art and science and poetry, and all the rest—going to smash at the nod of some doddering diplomatist! It was different in old times, when the best of life, for the immense majority, was never anything but plague, pestilence and famine. People are too healthy and well-fed now; they’re not going off to die in a ditch to oblige anybody.”

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