"Mr. Hale, do you know what I do of an evening, in the summer? I leave the shop at half-past five or six, and I step into my garden, where I work till half-past seven, when I am most exquisitely hungry. We dine here under this vine, my wife, my daughters, and my son (he who is now at the front). Afterwards we sit and chat and exchange impressions of the day, as the moon comes up or the stars come out. Perhaps some of the young friends of the children drop in for a game of cards. My wife and I sit down at the other end of the garden on the stone bench where we sat when she came here as a bride, where my father and mother sat when they were bride and groom. The stars come out. I smoke my pipe and watch them. Mr. Hale, it is very surprising, the things which come into your head, if you sit quietly and watch the stars come out. I would not miss thinking them for anything in the world. We talk a little, my wife knits. We meditate a great deal. We hear the gay voices of our children coming to us mingled with the breath of the roses. We have finished another day, and we are very glad to be there, alive, with each other, in our garden. When we come in, my wife makes me a cup of tisane and while I sip that I read, sometimes a little of Montaigne, sometimes a little of Horace, sometimes something modern. And all that while, Mr. Hale, there is in our home, in our hearts, the most precious distillation of peace, the ..." For some moments the American had been surging inwardly, and he now boiled over with a great wave of words. "Will you just let me tell you what you've been describing to me, Monsieur Réquine? The life of an old, old man ... and you're younger than I am! And will you let me tell you what I'd call your 'peace'? I'd call it laziness! Why, that's the kind of life that would suit an oyster right down to the ground! And, by George, that's the kind of life that gave the Boches their strangle-hold on French commerce before the war. They _weren't_ afraid of good credit when it was held out to them! They had it _too_ easy, with nobody to stand up against them but able-bodied men willing to sit down in their gardens in the evenings and meditate on the stars, instead of thinking how to enlarge their business! I'll bet they didn't read Horace instead of a good technical magazine that would keep them up to date. Why, Monsieur Réquine, I give you my word, I have never looked inside my Horace since the day I took the final exam in it! I wouldn't _dream_ of doing it! What would business come to if everybody sagged back like that? You don't seem to realize what business is, modern business. It's not just soulless materialistic money-making, it's the great, big, wide road that leads human beings to progress! It's what lets humanity get a chance to satisfy its wants, and get more wants, and satisfy them, and get more, and conquer the world from pole to pole. It's what gives men, grown men, with big muscles, obstacles of their size to get through. It