erybody had some friend or relative.

But these regiments had not yet entrained. There were few soldiers to
be seen on the streets. Khaki began to be noticeable in New York only
when the Plattsburg camps opened. After that there was an interim of
the usual dull, unaccented civilian monotony, mitigated at rare
intervals by this dun-coloured ebb and flow from Plattsburg.

Like the first vague premonitions of a nightmare the first ominous
symptoms of depression were slowly possessing hearts already uneasy
under two years' burden of rumours unprintable, horrors incredible to
those aloof and pursuing the peaceful tenor of their ways.

A growing restlessness, unbelief, the incapacity to
understand--selfishness, rapacity, self-righteousness, complacency,
cowardice, even stupidity itself were being jolted and shocked into
something resembling a glimmer of comprehension as the hunnish U-boats,
made ravenous by the taste of blood, steered into western shipping lanes
like a vast shoal of sharks.

And always thicker and thicker came the damning tales of rape
and murder, of cowardly savagery, brutal vileness, degenerate
bestiality--clearer, nearer, distinctly audible, the sigh of a
ravaged and expiring civilisation trampled to obliteration by the
slavering, ferocious swine of the north.

* * * * *

Fires among shipping, fires amid great stores of cotton and grain
destined for France or England, explosions of munitions of war ordered
by nations of the Entente, the clumsy propaganda or impudent sneers of
German and pro-German newspapers; reports of German meddling in
Mexico, in South America, in Japan; more sinister news concerning the
insolent activities of certain embassies--all these were beginning to
have their logical effect among a fat and prosperous people which
simply could not bear to be aroused from pleasant dreams of
brotherhood to face the raw and hellish truth.

* * * * *

"For fifty years," remarked Barres to his neighbour, Esme Trenor,
also a painter of somewhat eccentric portraits, "our national
characteristic has been a capacity for absorbing bunk and a fixed
determination to kid ourselves. There really is a war, Trenor, old
top, and we're going to get into it before very long."

Trenor, a tall, tired, exquisitely groomed young man, who once had
painted a superficially attractive portrait of a popular debutante,
and had been overwhelmed with fash