It did not suggest any overwhelming impatience. “Yes,” she answered. “In case you haven’t married yourself, and forgotten all about me.” He looked into her eyes, holding her hand, and she felt his body trembling. She knew he was about to speak, and held up a warning hand.!

The others rose and moved away. Hilda came and stood before Joan with her hands behind her. “It will be terrible,” she said. “It will last longer than you say. Every nation will be drawn into it. There will be no voice left to speak for reason. Every day we shall grow more brutalized, more pitiless. It will degrade us, crush the soul out of us. Blood and iron! It will become our God too: the God of all the world. You say we are going into it with clean hands, this time. How long will they keep clean? The people who only live for making money: how long do you think they will remain silent? What has been all the talk of the last ten years but of capturing German trade. We shall be told that we owe it to our dead to make a profit out of them; that otherwise they will have died in vain. Who will care for the people but to use them for killing one another—to hound them on like dogs. In every country nothing but greed and hatred will be preached. Horrible men and women will write to the papers crying out for more blood, more cruelty. Everything that can make for anger and revenge will be screamed from every newspaper. Every plea for humanity will be jeered at as ‘sickly sentimentality.’ Every man and woman who remembers the ideals with which we started will be shrieked at as a traitor. The people who are doing well out of it, they will get hold of the Press, appeal to the passions of the mob. Nobody else will be allowed to speak. It always has been so in war. It always will be. This will be no exception merely because it’s bigger. Every country will be given over to savagery. There will be no appeal against it. The whole world will sink back into the beast.”

“Cast out self, and God shall enter in, and you shall be One with God. For there is none so lowly that he may not become the Temple of God: there is none so great that he shall be greater than this.” It welcomed her, as always, with its smile of cosy neatness. The spotless curtains that were Mary’s pride: the gay flowers in the window, to which she had given children’s names: the few poor pieces of furniture, polished with much loving labour: the shining grate: the foolish china dogs and the little china house between them on the mantelpiece. The fire was burning brightly, and the kettle was singing on the hob. “And you don’t forget our compact, do you?” he continued, “that I am to be your backer. I want to be in it too.”