. I had gathered, when I dined there,
that Constance did not care for wine. She had said: "I don't care for
anything that makes me feel as though I couldn't work if I wanted to."
How Beatrice would have scoffed at that! And then, how Constance would
have smiled over Beatrice's ideals--her "fluffy" evenings--in a kind of
regretful, wondering way; almost as she had smiled when she first called
me "Dick," in asking what had become of our staid English reserve; as
she watched the noisy crowd in Fleet Street, singing its silly doggerel
about England's security and England's "dibs."

And then, suddenly, my picture-making thoughts swept out across low
Essex flats to the only part of East Anglia with which I was familiar,
and gave me a vision of burning farmhouses, and terror-smitten
country-folk fleeing blindly before a hail of bullets, and the pitiless
advance of legions of fair-haired men in long coats of a kind of
roan-gray, buttoned across the chest with bright buttons arranged to
suggest the inward curve to an imaginary waist-line. The faces of the
soldiers were all the same; they all had the face of Herr Mitmann of
Stettin. And a hot wave of angry resentment and hatred of these
machine-like invaders of a peaceful unprotected countryside pulsed
through my veins. Could they dare--here on English soil? My fists
clenched under the bed-clothes. If it was true, by heavens, there was
work for Englishmen toward!

My blood was hot at the thought. It was perhaps the first swelling of a
patriotic emotion I had known; the first hint of any larger citizenship
than that which claims and demands, without thought of giving. And,
immediately, it was succeeded by a sharp chill, a chill that ushered me
into one of the bitterest moments of humiliation that I can remember.
The thought accompanying that chill was this:

"What can you do? What are you fit for? What boy's part, even, can you
take, though the roof were being burned over your mother's head? What of
Constance, or Beatrice? Could you strike a blow for either? Work for
Englishmen, forsooth! Yes, for those of them who have ever learned a
man's part in such work. But you--you have never had a gun in your hand.
What have you done? You have poured out for your weekly wage so many
thousands of words; words meaning--what? Why, they have meant what the
roadside beggar means: 'Give! Give! Give!' They have urged men to demand
more from the State, and give the State nothing; to rob the Stat