to know where we will be two years from now."

"Some of us won't be here. Have you seen Lloyd George's speech on the
German peace terms? That means going on to the end. A speedy peace might
have left us out, but there will be no peace. Not yet, or soon."

"And still we don't prepare!"

"The English tradition persists," said the Irishman, bitterly. "We want
to wait, and play to the last moment, and then upset our business and
overthrow the whole country, trying to get ready in a hurry.

"I wonder what they will do, when the time comes, with men like you and
myself?"

"Take our money," said Nolan viciously. "Tax our heads off. Thank God I
haven't a son."

Clayton eyed him with the comprehension of long acquaintance.

"Exactly," he said. "But you'll go yourself, if you can."

"And fight for England? I will not."

He pursued the subject further, going into an excited account of
Ireland's grievances. He was flushed and loquacious. He quoted Lloyd
George's "quagmire of distrust" in tones raised over the noise of the
band. And Clayton was conscious of a growing uneasiness. How much of
it was real, how much a pose? Was Nolan representative of the cultured
Irishman in America? And if he was, what would be the effect of their
anti-English mania? Would we find ourselves, like the British, split
into factions? Or would the country be drawn together by trouble until
it changed from a federation of states to a great nation, united and
unbeatable?

Were we really the melting pot of the world, and was war the fiery
furnace which was to fuse us together, or were there elements, like
Nolan, like the German-Americans, that would never fuse?

He left Nolan still irritable and explosive, and danced once with
Natalie, his only dance of the evening. Then, finding that Rodney Page
would see her to her car later, he went home.

He had a vague sense of disappointment, a return of the critical mood of
the early days of his return from France. He went to his room and tried
to read, but he gave it up, and lay, cigaret in hand, thinking!

There ought to have come to a man, when he reached the middle span,
certain compensations for the things that had gone with his youth, the
call of adventure, the violent impulses of his early love life. There
should come, to take their place, friends, a new zest in the romance of
achievement, since other romance had gone, and--peace. But the peace
of the middle span of life should be the peace of fu