I lost myself in horrified contemplation of the grotesque vision he had conjured up and forgot to refute him. Perhaps I couldn't. Towards the end of his stay he was very much troubled by persistent rumors that the boat on which he was to sail would be torpedoed on the way to New York. He acknowledged, with the fatigued frankness of his sixty years past, that he was mortally afraid of the passage and that his fear would deprive him of sleep all the way over. "No sane man likes to be killed," he complained, "let alone be blown up and burned to death and drowned into the bargain! I'm a family man! I want to go on earning a living for my wife and children!" The evening before he went away he was so fretful about this and so outspoken about his dread, that I asked him, "Why don't you wait over a boat?" "Oh, what's the use? One boat's as likely to go down as another. And, anyhow, I've got to get home. And then come over again for the next season, curse the luck!" I thought him again a little absurd. "Oh, come, the heavens wouldn't fall if you missed one or two seasons!" He turned grave, and after a moment's hesitation, opened a door which I had thought locked and nailed up, and showed me that the room in his heart which I had thought was certainly empty and vacant was a queer, dimly lighted little chapel, with queer, dim little candles burning before what was recognizably an ideal. "Oh, it's no time for anybody to lie down on the job," he said offhand. I did not dream that he was referring to the war. I had become convinced that his curious, specialized world held no place for the horror and apprehension which filled the lives of the rest of us. Nor had I ever seen him give any signs of the shocked pity which most people feel at the sight of the war-maimed men, the black-clad, white-faced war-orphans and the widows with blurred eyes. I had thought he saw in France, only and uniquely, hats. So I asked in genuine ignorance of his meaning: "How do you mean, this being no time to lie down on the job? What job?"