alace and in the meanest hovel, there lives and reigns a
dead young man in the glory of his strength. He fills the poorest,
darkest dwelling with a splendour of which it had never ventured to
dream. His constant presence, imperious and inevitable, diffuses and
maintains a religion and ideas which it had never known before, hallows
everything around it, makes the eyes look higher, prevents the spirit
from descending, purifies the air that is breathed and the speech that
is held and the thoughts that are mustered there, and, little by
little, ennobles and uplifts the whole people on a scale of unexampled
vastness." Surely, in beautiful words such as these, Maeterlinck but
echoes the consolation of many a very lonely heart since the tragedy of
August, 1914. Without "my boy"--many a desolate heart imagined that it
could never face the road of Calvary which is life now that he is gone.
And yet, when the blow came, something they thought would have vanished
for ever still remained with them. They could not tell if it were a
"presence," felt but unseen, but this they _knew_--though they could
not argue their convictions--that everything which made life happy,
which lent it meaning, was not lost, had not faded away before the
life-long loneliness which faced them; it still lived on--lived on as
an Inspiration and as a Hope that one day the road to Calvary would
come to an end, that they would reach their journey's end--and find
their loved one _waiting_.

_The Unholy Fear_

She didn't object to the celebrations for the anniversary of the
signing of Armistice--in fact, she quite enjoyed them--but she did
object to the few minutes' silent remembrance of the Glorious Dead. It
depressed her. She brought out the old "tag" so beloved of people who
dread sadness, even reverential sadness, that "the world is full enough
of sorrow without adding to it unnecessarily!" Not much sorrow had
come her way, except the sorrow of not always getting her own way; and
the anniversary of the Armistice meant for her the Victory Ball at the
Albert Hall, a new dress of silver and paste diamonds, a fat supper,
and that jolly feeling of believing that a real "beano" is justified
because, after all, _we_ won the war, didn't we? Therefore, she
disliked this bringing back to the world of the tragic fact--the fact
of what war really means beyond the patriotic talk of politicians, the
Victory celebrations, the rush to pick up the threads which