and her brown eyes watched
me and wondered at my black silences, my frowning preoccupations.
I had not told her how it was my ankle came to be bruised and my
clothes muddy. She had brushed my clothes in the morning before I
got up.

Ah well! Mothers are not treated in that way now. That I suppose
must console me. I wonder how far you will be able to picture that
dark, grimy, untidy room, with its bare deal table, its tattered
wall paper, the saucepans and kettle on the narrow, cheap, but
by no means economical range, the ashes under the fireplace, the
rust-spotted steel fender on which my bandaged feet rested; I wonder
how near you can come to seeing the scowling pale-faced hobbledehoy
I was, unshaven and collarless, in the Windsor chair, and the little
timid, dirty, devoted old woman who hovered about me with
love peering out from her puckered eyelids. . .

When she went out to buy some vegetables in the middle of the
morning she got me a half-penny journal. It was just such a one as
these upon my desk, only that the copy I read was damp from the
press, and these are so dry and brittle, they crack if I touch
them. I have a copy of the actual issue I read that morning; it
was a paper called emphatically the New Paper, but everybody bought
it and everybody called it the "yell." It was full that morning of
stupendous news and still more stupendous headlines, so stupendous
that for a little while I was roused from my egotistical broodings
to wider interests. For it seemed that Germany and England were on
the brink of war.

Of all the monstrous irrational phenomena of the former time, war
was certainly the most strikingly insane. In reality it was probably
far less mischievous than such quieter evil as, for example, the
general acquiescence in the private ownership of land, but its evil
consequences showed so plainly that even in those days of stifling
confusion one marveled at it. On no conceivable grounds was there
any sense in modern war. Save for the slaughter and mangling of a
multitude of people, the destruction of vast quantities of material,
and the waste of innumerable units of energy, it effected nothing.
The old war of savage and barbaric nations did at least change
humanity, you assumed yourselves to be a superior tribe in physique
and discipline, you demonstrated this upon your neighbors, and
if successful you took their land and their women and perpetuated
and enlarged your superiority. The new war change