"Well, isn't it?" demanded Mr. Spenlove. "What made this war so popular? Wasn't it simply because it supplied men who had been surfeited with love, with an almost forgotten inspiration? Hadn't we been bred for a generation on Love, beautiful Love, which laughed at locksmiths and made the world go round? And here came Hate to have a turn! I tell you, something _had_ to happen or we should all have gone crazy. Captain Evans, with his exalted notions of domestic affection, was our ideal. We were becoming monsters of marital egotism. You remember that song on the halls: "_What more can you want when you've got your wife and kids, And a nice little home of your own?_ "That was rapidly becoming the sum total of England's morality. All men were 'men without a country' and they didn't much care even if they were citizens of a mean city, so long as their own contemptible little hutch was secure. I rather think the war has dealt that doctrine an ugly blow." "Well, go on," said somebody. "You must remember that Jack and his Madeline didn't simply look down on the rest of the world as sordid worms who couldn't appreciate such a holy passion. They didn't think of us at all. We didn't exist. Nothing existed--for them--outside that microscopic domestic circle. Madeline had been brought up to be refined, reserved, 'not like other girls.' She silently and unconsciously laid down a narrow-gauge line along which she and Jack were to advance through life, and Jack, who was one of those men who are very much what their wives make them, was only too glad to get his orders. And he, with the intuition of despair, knowing her to be besotted with pride in their child almost beyond endurance, gobbled hoarsely in my ear in the night watches that if one died the other would follow, and leave him desolate.