of his own life, but was to affect thousands
who would never meet him.

The creative mind is ever elusive and unexpected in its workings. In it
the masculine and feminine temperaments are fused. It leaps to
conclusions--erroneous maybe, but sustained by the feminine conviction
that what is instinctive must be true. Selwyn's was essentially a
creative mind, prone to emotionalism and to inspiration. With men of his
type logic is largely retrogressive: the conclusion is reached first; the
reasons follow.

A few days before his imagination had been strangely stirred by the
swiftness of thought which at twilight in England could visualise New
York at noon. Simple though the scientific explanation might be, it had
left him with a sense of detachment, almost as if he were on Olympus and
the world spread out below for him to gaze upon.

That feeling now returned with redoubled force.

The group of villagers had parted into many human fragments. He could
hear the hearty invitation of the innkeeper for all boon spirits to join
him, free of expense--and regardless of the liquor laws--in a pint of
bitter, to drink confusion to the enemy. But to Selwyn they seemed
creatures of another planet--or, rather, that he was the visitor in a
world of strange inhabitants.

All the resentfulness of an idealist whose ancestry was steeped in
liberty of action rose to a fury at this unwarrantable interference of
war with the lives of men--a fury maddened by his feeling of utter
impotence. Was it possible, he argued, that a group of men drunk with
pomp and lust of conquest could wreck the whole fabric of civilisation?
What of science and education? Had they risen only to be the playthings
of madmen? What kind of a world was it that allowed such things?

Was it possible, however, that this war was different from any other?
Granted that Austria had willed the crushing of Servia, and that Germany
was instigator of the crime--had not the rest of the world proved false
to their creeds by allowing the war-hunger of the Central Powers to
achieve its aim? Supposing France, Britain, America, and Italy had
joined in an immediate warning to Germany and Austria that if they did
not desist from their malpractices the area of their countries would be
declared a plague-spot, commercial intercourse with the outside world
would be brought to an end, and their citizens treated as lepers. If
that had been done, men could have gone on leading the l