the rest of my days.'

'Germany's simplicity is that of the neurotic, not the primitive. It
is megalomania and egotism and the pride of the man in the Bible that
waxed fat and kicked. But the results are the same. She wants to
destroy and simplify; but it isn't the simplicity of the ascetic, which
is of the spirit, but the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all
the contrivances of civilization to a featureless monotony. The prophet
wants to save the souls of his people; Germany wants to rule the
inanimate corpse of the world. But you can get the same language to
cover both. And so you have the partnership of St Francis and
Messalina. Dick, did you ever hear of a thing called the Superman?'

'There was a time when the papers were full of nothing else,' I
answered. 'I gather it was invented by a sportsman called Nietzsche.'

'Maybe,' said Sandy. 'Old Nietzsche has been blamed for a great deal
of rubbish he would have died rather than acknowledge. But it's a
craze of the new, fatted Germany. It's a fancy type which could never
really exist, any more than the Economic Man of the politicians.
Mankind has a sense of humour which stops short of the final absurdity.
There never has been, and there never could be a real Superman ... But
there might be a Superwoman.'

'You'll get into trouble, my lad, if you talk like that,' I said.

'It's true all the same. Women have got a perilous logic which we
never have, and some of the best of them don't see the joke of life
like the ordinary man. They can be far greater than men, for they can
go straight to the heart of things. There never was a man so near the
divine as Joan of Arc. But I think, too, they can be more entirely
damnable than anything that ever was breeched, for they don't stop
still now and then and laugh at themselves ... There is no Superman.
The poor old donkeys that fancy themselves in the part are either
crackbrained professors who couldn't rule a Sunday-school class, or
bristling soldiers with pint-pot heads who imagine that the shooting of
a Duc d'Enghien made a Napoleon. But there is a Superwoman, and her
name's Hilda von Einem.'

'I thought our job was nearly over,' I groaned, 'and now it looks as if
it hadn't well started. Bullivant said that all we had to do was to
find out the truth.'

'Bullivant didn't know. No man knows except you and me. I tell you,
the woman has immense power. The Germans have trusted her with their
trump