foundations and blast the
steel and fasten the girders together? It was easy for the dreamers
and the literary loafers and the irresponsible cartoonists to denounce
the capitalists and draw pictures of them as obese swine wallowing in
bags of gold while emaciated children put out their lean hands in
vain. But cartoons were not construction, and the men who would
revolutionize the world could not, as a rule, keep their own books
straight.

Material riches were everywhere, provided one had the mental riches to
go out and get them. Davidge had been as poor as the poorest man at
his works, but he had sold muscle for money and brains for money. He
had dreamed and schemed and drawn up tremendous plans while they took
their pay and went home to their evenings of repose in the bosoms of
their families or the barrooms of idleness.

Still there was no convincing them of the realization that they could
not get capital by slandering capitalists, or ease by ease, but only
by sweat. And so everybody was saying that as soon as this great war
was over a greater war was coming upon the world. He wondered what
could be done to stay that universal fury from destroying utterly all
that the German horror might spare.

Thinking of such things, he forgot, for the nonce, the pangs of
love.

BOOK V

IN WASHINGTON

[Illustration: How quaint a custom it is for people who know each other
well and see each other in plain clothes every day to get themselves up
with meticulous skill in the evening like Christmas parcels for each
other's examination.]

CHAPTER I

The threat of winter was terrifying the long-suffering world. People
thought of the gales that would harass the poor souls in the clammy
trenches, the icy winds that would flutter the tents of the men in
camps, the sleety storms that would lash the workers on the docks and
on the decks of ships and in the shipyards; the final relentless
persecution of the refugees, crowded upon the towns that had not
enough for themselves.

To be cold when one is despondent is a fearsome thing. Mamise woke in
the chill little cottage and had to leap from her snug bed to a cold
bathroom, come out chattering to a cold kitchen. Just as her house
grew a little warm, she had to leave it for a long, windy walk to an
office not half warm enough.

The air was full of orphan leaves, and Cossack whirlwinds stampeded
them down the roads as ruthlessly as Uhlans herding Belgian fugitives
alo