stening for the first ominous
rumbling of a rotten, tottering Empire.

God alone knows why he gave to France, in the supreme moment of
her need, the beings who filled heaven with the wind of their
lungs and brought her to her knees in shame--not for brave men
dead in vain, not for a wasted land, scourged and flame-shrunken
from the Rhine to the Loire, not for provinces lost nor cities
gone forever--but for the strange creatures that her agony
brought forth, shapes simian and weird, all mouth and convulsive
movement, little pigmy abortions mouthing and playing antics
before high Heaven while the land ran blood in every furrow and
the world was a hell of flame.

Gambetta, that incubus of bombastic flabbiness, roaring prophecy
and platitude through the dismayed city, kept his eye on the
balcony of the particular edifice where, later, he should pose as
an animated Jericho trumpet. So, biding his time, he bellowed,
but it was the Comedie Francaise that was the loser, not the
people, when he sailed away in his balloon, posed, squatting
majestically as the god of war above the clouds of battle. And
little Thiers, furtive, timid, delighting in senile efforts to
stir the ferment of chaos till it boiled, he, too, was there,
owl-like, squeaky-voiced, a true "Bombyx a Lunettes." There, too,
was Hugo--often ridiculous in his terrible moods, egotistical,
sloppy, roaring. The Empire pinched Hugo, and he roared; and let
the rest of the world judge whether, under such circumstances,
there was majesty in the roar. The spectacle of Hugo, prancing on
the ramparts and hurling bad names at the German armies, recalls
the persistent but painful manoeuvres of a lion with a flea. Both
are terribly in earnest--neither is sublime.

Jack sat leaning on the window-ledge, his chin on both hands,
watching the moonlight rippling across the sea of steel below.
Lorraine, also silent, buried in an arm-chair, lay huddled
somewhere in the shadows, looking up at the stars, scarcely
visible in the radiance of the moon.

After a while she spoke in a low voice: "Do you remember in
chapel a week ago--what--"

"Yes, I know what you mean. Can you say it--any of it?"

"Yes, all."

Presently he heard her voice in the darkness repeating the
splendid lines:

"'In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and
the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease
because they are few, and they that look out of the windows be
darkened.