One topic that never lost its interest was: Who made wars? Who hounded the people into them, and kept them there, tearing at one another’s throats? They never settled it. God. The Eternal Creator. Out of matter, lifeless void, he had moulded His worlds, had ordered His endless firmament. It was finished. The greater task remained: the Universe of mind, of soul. Out of man it should be created. God in man and man in God: made in like image: fellow labourers together with one another: together they should build it. Out of the senseless strife and discord, above the chaos and the tumult should be heard the new command: “Let there be Love.”!

Joan looked at her watch. She had an article to finish. Madge stood on tiptoe and kissed her. “We must stir the people up about this food business,” he said, plunging at once into his subject. “Phillips is quite right. It overshadows everything. We must make the country self-supporting. It can be done and must. If a war were to be sprung upon us we could be starved out in a month. Our navy, in face of these new submarines, is no longer able to secure us. France is working day and night upon them. It may be a bogey, or it may not. If it isn’t, she would have us at her mercy; and it’s too big a risk to run. You live in the same house with him, don’t you? Do you often see him?”

“Shall I shut the door?” suggested Joan. “Yes, but didn’t they all feel it,” Madge suggested. She still seemed to be arguing with herself rather than with Joan. “Nietzsche. I have been reading him. They are forming a Nietzsche Society to give lectures about him—propagate him over here. Eleanor’s in it up to the neck. It seems to me awful. Every fibre in my being revolts against him. Yet they’re all cocksure that he is the coming prophet. He must have convinced himself that he is serving God. If I were a fighter I should feel I was serving God trying to down Him. How do I know which of us is right? Torquemada—Calvin,” she went on, without giving Joan the chance of a reply. “It’s easy enough to see they were wrong now. But at the time millions of people believed in them—felt it was God’s voice speaking through them. Joan of Arc! Fancy dying to put a thing like that upon a throne. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. You can say she drove out the English—saved France. But for what? The Bartholomew massacres. The ruin of the Palatinate by Louis XIV. The horrors of the French Revolution, ending with Napoleon and all the misery and degeneracy that he bequeathed to Europe. History might have worked itself out so much better if the poor child had left it alone and minded her sheep.” She placed the ring on her finger and held out her hand. “I might have been measured for it,” she said. “I wonder how he knew.”