Back at the base of Jeremy’s hard-thinking brain there lay a lurking self-accusation. Had he not used the political stress as a convenient alibi? Had The Guardian truly stood on guard against the subtle and powerful inner war being waged across the hyphen? What of the promise, deadly serious despite its quaint Isaian twist, given to Marcia Ames? He sensed the looming conflict. He shrank from the terms of fulfillment to be exacted from him. But take up his pledge he must, when the hour came, though Hell from beneath were moved for him to meet him at his coming. CHAPTER VIII DUMBA had gone. Von Bernstorff was preparing for departure. The atmosphere which they had created under the cloak of diplomatic privilege was malodorous with the taint of plottings, corruption, and chicanery. Grain elevators were developing extraordinary tendencies toward spontaneous combustion. Munitions plants were dissolving into fiery fragments, in numbers beyond the reckoning of insurance-risk experts. Strikes were materializing in the most unexpected places and for the most unexplained reasons. An informal morning call upon a peaceful and businessless “advertising agency” office in lower New York had laid bare to the heads of Government the extent of Germany’s official treachery, and inklings of it were beginning to leak out to the public. Strident politicians were filling the atmosphere with irresponsible clamor. The American representatives of Deutschtum were frantically explaining, denying, palliating, sulking, or plotting. No corner of the horizon but bristled with imminent lightnings. The earth underfoot trembled with the rumble of coming events. So the old year of 1916 which saw civilization fighting with its back to the wall, the great bubble of Russian might and Russian nationalism already dissipating, France staggering though still resolute, England facing terror and herself the more terrible in that grim confrontation, the lesser nations opponent to Germany crushed to a mere welter of blood, the Hun savagely certain of his triumph, and on this side of the ocean, the United States being slowly, steadily, unwittingly, powerfully drawn and bound by the gossamer threads of a nation’s psychology to the great purposes before it--so 1916 passed into 1917.