She was alone in a maze of narrow, silent streets that ended always in a high blank wall. It seemed impossible to get away from this blank wall. Whatever way she turned she was always coming back to it. “Oh, just enough to be of no use,” Mary answered. “Carleton was rather decent, so far as that part of it was concerned, and insisted on paying him a fair price. The market value would have been much less; and he wanted to be out of it.”!

“No, that’s precisely what he isn’t,” answered Joan. “You feel that he belongs to no class, but his own. The class of the Abraham Lincolns, and the Dantons.” “That shows how far it has gone,” she told him, “that you don’t even know it. You pretend to be a philosopher. But you’re really a man.”

“And suppose she repeats her mother’s experience,” suggested Joan. “Yes,” said Joan. “Not any great number of them, not yet. But enough to show that I really am interesting them. It grows every week.” Sometimes they agreed it was the newspapers that made war—that fanned every trivial difference into a vital question of national honour—that, whenever there was any fear of peace, re-stoked the fires of hatred with their never-failing stories of atrocities. At other times they decided it was the capitalists, the traders, scenting profit for themselves. Some held it was the politicians, dreaming of going down to history as Richelieus or as Bismarcks. A popular theory was that cause for war was always discovered by the ruling classes whenever there seemed danger that the workers were getting out of hand. In war, you put the common people back in their place, revived in them the habits of submission and obedience. Napoleon the Little, it was argued, had started the war of 1870 with that idea. Russia had welcomed the present war as an answer to the Revolution that was threatening Czardom. Others contended it was the great munition industries, aided by the military party, the officers impatient for opportunities of advancement, the strategists eager to put their theories to the test. A few of the more philosophical shrugged their shoulders. It was the thing itself that sooner or later was bound to go off of its own accord. Half every country’s energy, half every country’s time and money was spent in piling up explosives. In every country envy and hatred of every other country was preached as a religion. They called it patriotism. Sooner or later the spark fell.