particular duty. Even if right now I'm just a
pawn--just sacrificed. God! Amory--you don't think I like the Germans!"

"Well, I can't say anything else--I get to the end of all the logic
about non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle, stands the
huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. And this spectre stands
right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi's, and the other
logical necessity of Nietzsche's--" Amory broke off suddenly. "When are
you going?"

"I'm going next week."

"I'll see you, of course."

As he walked away it seemed to Amory that the look in his face bore
a great resemblance to that in Kerry's when he had said good-by under
Blair Arch two years before. Amory wondered unhappily why he could never
go into anything with the primal honesty of those two.

"Burne's a fanatic," he said to Tom, "and he's dead wrong and, I'm
inclined to think, just an unconscious pawn in the hands of anarchistic
publishers and German-paid rag wavers--but he haunts me--just leaving
everything worth while--"

Burne left in a quietly dramatic manner a week later. He sold all his
possessions and came down to the room to say good-by, with a battered
old bicycle, on which he intended to ride to his home in Pennsylvania.

"Peter the Hermit bidding farewell to Cardinal Richelieu," suggested
Alec, who was lounging in the window-seat as Burne and Amory shook
hands.

But Amory was not in a mood for that, and as he saw Burne's long legs
propel his ridiculous bicycle out of sight beyond Alexander Hall,
he knew he was going to have a bad week. Not that he doubted the
war--Germany stood for everything repugnant to him; for materialism and
the direction of tremendous licentious force; it was just that Burne's
face stayed in his memory and he was sick of the hysteria he was
beginning to hear.

"What on earth is the use of suddenly running down Goethe," he declared
to Alec and Tom. "Why write books to prove he started the war--or that
that stupid, overestimated Schiller is a demon in disguise?"

"Have you ever read anything of theirs?" asked Tom shrewdly.

"No," Amory admitted.

"Neither have I," he said laughing.

"People will shout," said Alec quietly, "but Goethe's on his same old
shelf in the library--to bore any one that wants to read him!"

Amory subsided, and the subject dropped.

"What are you going to do, Amory?"

"Infantry or aviation, I can't make up my mind--I hate mechanics, but
then of cour