He gave a short laugh. “A trick,” he said, “to weaken me. They think to shave my locks; show me to the people bound by their red tape. To put it another way, a rat among the terriers.” Joan started. She had been thinking about Phillips, wondering what she should say to him when they met.!

She had just the head mistress expression. Joan wasn’t quite sure she oughtn’t to stand. But, controlling the instinct, leant back in her chair, and tried to look defiant without feeling it. “Ask Phillips to come and see me,” he said. “I can be of more help, if I know exactly his views.”

“No, it wasn’t,” answered the child. “Most of them were against it. And then there was Mama,” she added in a lower tone. “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.” Looking down, she could see thin wreaths of smoke, rising from the ground. From underneath her feet there came a low, faint, ceaseless murmur.