follow, he continued, "You only care about the things that you can use,
and therefore arrange them in the following order: Money, supremely
useful; intellect, rather useful; imagination, of no use at all.
No"--for the other had protested--"your Pan-Germanism is no more
imaginative than is our Imperialism over here. It is the vice of a
vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square
miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and
that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is
not imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over here try to
celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally. Your poets
too are dying, your philosophers, your musicians, to whom Europe has
listened for two hundred years. Gone. Gone with the little courts that
nurtured them--gone with Esterhazy and Weimar. What? What's that? Your
universities? Oh yes, you have learned men, who collect more facts
than do the learned men of England. They collect facts, and facts, and
empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?"

To all this Margaret listened, sitting on the haughty nephew's knee.

It was a unique education for the little girls. The haughty nephew would
be at Wickham Place one day, bringing with him an even haughtier wife,
both convinced that Germany was appointed by God to govern the world.
Aunt Juley would come the next day, convinced that Great Britain had
been appointed to the same post by the same authority. Were both these
loud-voiced parties right? On one occasion they had met and Margaret
with clasped hands had implored them to argue the subject out in her
presence. Whereat they blushed, and began to talk about the weather.
"Papa," she cried--she was a most offensive child--"why will they not
discuss this most clear question?" Her father, surveying the parties
grimly, replied that he did not know. Putting her head on one side,
Margaret then remarked, "To me one of two things is very clear; either
God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or else these
do not know the mind of God." A hateful little girl, but at thirteen
she had grasped a dilemma that most people travel through life without
perceiving. Her brain darted up and down; it grew pliant and strong. Her
conclusion was, that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any
organisation, and from this she never varied.

Helen advanced along the same lines, though with a