Politics? Yes, it undoubtedly was the Great Game. Strong men fancied themselves somewhat at it, and conceited themselves, after the fashion of men, that it was they who wrought this marvel or that. But was it? Had there not been women so much stronger than they that, doing apparently nothing, their nothings had been more potent than all the rest? She began to give her fancy play. For example, there was that about a face launching a thousand ships. That was an old story, of course; if a face could launch a thousand ships so many centuries ago, there was practically no limit to its powers with the British Navy at its present magnificent pitch of numerical efficiency. But that by the way. It was the idea that had seized Amory. Say a face--Helen's, she thought it was--had launched a thousand, or even five hundred ships; where was the point? Why, surely that that old Greek Lord High Admiral, whoever he was--(Amory must look him up; chapter and verse would be so very silencing if she ever had occasion to put all this into words)--surely he had thought, as all men thought, that he was obeying no behest but his own. The chances were that he had hardly wasted a thought on Helen's face as a factor in the launching.... Yet Helen's face had been the real launching force, or rather the brain behind Helen's face ... but Amory admitted that she was not quite sure of her ground there. Perhaps she was mixing Helen up with somebody else. At any rate, if she was wrong about Helen she was not wrong about Catherine of Russia. Nor about Cleopatra. Nor about the Pompadour. These had all had brains, far superior to the brains of their men, which they had used through the medium of their beauty. She knew this because she had been reading about them quite recently, and could put her finger on the very page; she had a wonderful memory for the places in books in which passages occurred.... So there were Catherine the Second, and Cleopatra, and the Pompadour, even if she had been wrong about Helen. That was a curious omission of Homer's, by the way--or was it Virgil?--the omission of all reference to the brain behind. Perhaps it had seemed so obvious that he took it for granted. But barring that, the notion of a face launching the ships was very fine. It was the Romantic Point of View. Hitherto Amory had passed over the Romantic Point of View rather lightly, but now she rather thought there was a good deal in it. At any rate that about the face of a woman being the real launching-force of a whole lot of ships--well, it was an exaggeration, of course, and in a sense only a poetic way of putting it--but it was quite a ripping idea.