And yet all mortal things are subject to decay, even reactions, even decay itself, and there comes a time when the dead Ophelia may justly be said to be not decomposing, but recomposing successfully as violets and so forth. Heirs-apparent grow up into kings and have little heirs of their own who, hearkening to nature's benevolent law, become stout counter-reactionists in their turn. So now the pre-war virilists, the literary braves who felt that they had supped too full of peace, have died in their beds, or lost voice, like the cuckoos in June, and a different breed find voice and pipe up. These are the kind, the numerous kind, whose youth has supped quite full enough of war. For them Bellona has not the mystical charm, as of grapes out of reach, that she had for the Henleys and Stevensons. All the veiled-mistress business is off. Battles have no aureoles now in the sight of young men as they had for the British prelate who wrote that old poem about the "red rain." The men of the counter-reaction have gone to the school and sat the oratorio out and taken a course of the waters, after the worthy prelate's prescription. They have seen trenches full of gassed men, and the queue of their friends at the brothel-door in Bethune. At the heart of the magical rose was seated an earwig. Presently all the complaisant part of our Press may jump to the fact that the game of idealizing war is now, in its turn, a back number. Then we may hear such a thudding or patter of feet as Carlyle describes when Louis XV was seen to be dead and the Court bolted off, _ventre à terre_, along the corridors of Versailles, to kiss the hand of Louis XVI. And then will come the season of danger. Woe unto Peace, or anyone else, when all men speak well of her, even the base. When Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Clynes and Sir Hubert Gough stand up for the peace which ex-soldiers desire, it is all right. But what if Tadpoe and Taper stood up for it? What if all the vendors of supposedly popular stuff, all the timid gregarious repeaters of current banalities, all the largest circulations in the solar system were on the side of peace, as well as her old bodyguard of game disregarders of fashion and whimsical stickers-up for Christianity, chivalry, or sportsmanship?