" said Roger. "Perfectly true. But I've got away from
the point I had in mind. Humanity is yearning now as it never did
before for truth, for beauty, for the things that comfort and console
and make life seem worth while. I feel this all round me, every day.
We've been through a frightful ordeal, and every decent spirit is
asking itself what we can do to pick up the fragments and remould the
world nearer to our heart's desire. Look here, here's something I
found the other day in John Masefield's preface to one of his plays:
'The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be
scorned. A carelessness of life and beauty marks the glutton, the
idler, and the fool in their deadly path across history.' I tell you,
I've done some pretty sober thinking as I've sat here in my bookshop
during the past horrible years. Walt Whitman wrote a little poem
during the Civil War--Year that trembled and reeled beneath me, said
Walt, Must I learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled, and sullen
hymns of defeat?--I've sat here in my shop at night, and looked round
at my shelves, looked at all the brave books that house the hopes and
gentlenesses and dreams of men and women, and wondered if they were all
wrong, discredited, defeated. Wondered if the world were still merely
a jungle of fury. I think I'd have gone balmy if it weren't for Walt
Whitman. Talk about Mr. Britling--Walt was the man who 'saw it
through.'

"The glutton, the idler, and the fool in their deadly path across
history. . . . Aye, a deadly path indeed. The German military men
weren't idlers, but they were gluttons and fools to the nth power.
Look at their deadly path! And look at other deadly paths, too. Look
at our slums, jails, insane asylums. . . .

"I used to wonder what I could do to justify my comfortable existence
here during such a time of horror. What right had I to shirk in a
quiet bookshop when so many men were suffering and dying through no
fault of their own? I tried to get into an ambulance unit, but I've
had no medical training and they said they didn't want men of my age
unless they were experienced doctors."

"I know how you felt," said Titania, with a surprising look of
comprehension. "Don't you suppose that a great many girls, who
couldn't do anything real to help, got tired of wearing neat little
uniforms with Sam Browne belts?"

"Well," said Roger, "it was a bad time. The war contradicted and
denied everything I had