."

Lilly stared at Aaron with black eyes.

"Do you believe in them less than I do, Aaron?" he asked slowly.

"I don't even want to believe in them."

"But in yourself?" Lilly was almost wistful--and Aaron uneasy.

"I don't know that I've any more right to believe in myself than in
them," he replied. Lilly watched and pondered.

"No," he said. "That's not true--I KNEW the war was false: humanly
quite false. I always knew it was false. The Germans were false, we were
false, everybody was false."

"And not you?" asked Aaron shrewishly.

"There was a wakeful, self-possessed bit of me which knew that the war
and all that horrible movement was false for me. And so I wasn't going
to be dragged in. The Germans could have shot my mother or me or what
they liked: I wouldn't have joined the WAR. I would like to kill my
enemy. But become a bit of that huge obscene machine they called the
war, that I never would, no, not if I died ten deaths and had eleven
mothers violated. But I would like to kill my enemy: Oh, yes, more than
one enemy. But not as a unit in a vast obscene mechanism. That never:
no, never."

Poor Lilly was too earnest and vehement. Aaron made a fine nose. It
seemed to him like a lot of words and a bit of wriggling out of a hole.

"Well," he said, "you've got men and nations, and you've got the
machines of war--so how are you going to get out of it? League of
Nations?"

"Damn all leagues. Damn all masses and groups, anyhow. All I want is
to get MYSELF out of their horrible heap: to get out of the swarm. The
swarm to me is nightmare and nullity--horrible helpless writhing in
a dream. I want to get myself awake, out of it all--all that
mass-consciousness, all that mass-activity--it's the most horrible
nightmare to me. No man is awake and himself. No man who was awake and
in possession of himself would use poison gases: no man. His own awake
self would scorn such a thing. It's only when the ghastly mob-sleep,
the dream helplessness of the mass-psyche overcomes him, that he becomes
completely base and obscene."

"Ha--well," said Aaron. "It's the wide-awake ones that invent the poison
gas, and use it. Where should we be without it?"

Lilly started, went stiff and hostile.

"Do you mean that, Aaron?" he said, looking into Aaron's face with a
hard, inflexible look.

Aaron turned aside half sheepishly.

"That's how it looks on the face of it, isn't it?" he said.

"Look here, my friend, it's too late fo