“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.” “To tell the truth,” he answered, “that’s exactly what I’ve been saying to myself. I shan’t be any good. I don’t see myself sticking a bayonet into even a German. Unless he happened to be abnormally clumsy. I tried to shoot a rabbit once. I might have done it if the little beggar, instead of running away, hadn’t turned and looked at me.”!

A dark, black-bearded man raised himself painfully upon his elbow. He was a tailor in the Rue Parnesse, and prided himself on a decided resemblance to Victor Hugo. “Yes,” she answered. “It was the last time he came to see me in London. And I could not help feeling a bit jealous. He was doing things while I was writing and talking. But I was glad he was an Allway. It will be known as the Allway scheme. New ways will date from it.”

“I mean,” she continued, “to what fundamental rule of conduct do you attribute your success?” Even Mrs. Grundy herself couldn’t object to a journalist dining with a politician! Joan had never known him quite so serious. Generally there was a touch of irony in his talk, a suggestion of aloofness that had often irritated her.