After the first evening that this had taken place, Somers was much more wary of his neighbour, much less ready to open towards him than he had been. _He never again invited Jack to a game of chess._ And when Callcott suggested a game, Somers played, but coldly, without the recklessness and the laughter which were the chief charm of his game. And Jack was once more snubbed, put back into second place. Then once he was reduced, Somers began to relent, and the old guerilla warfare started again. The moment Somers heard this question of Jack’s: “What do you think of things in general?”--he went on his guard. “The man is trying to draw me, to fool me,” he said to himself. He knew by a certain quiet, almost sly intention in Jack’s voice, and a certain false deference in his bearing. It was this false deference he was most wary of. This was the Judas approach. “How in general?” he asked. “Do you mean the cosmos?” “No,” said Jack, foiled in his first move. He had been through the Australian high-school course, and was accustomed to think for himself. Over a great field he was quite indifferent to thought, and hostile to consciousness. It seemed to him more manly to be unconscious, even blank, to most of the great questions. But on his own subjects, Australian politics, Japan, and machinery, he thought straight and manly enough. And when he met a man whose being puzzled him, he wanted to get at the bottom of that, too. He looked up at Somers with a searching, penetrating, inimical look, that he tried to cover with an appearance of false deference. For he was always aware of the big empty spaces of his own consciousness; like his country, a vast empty “desert” at the centre of him. “No,” he repeated. “I mean the world--economics and politics. The welfare of the world.” “It’s no good asking me,” said Somers. “Since the war burst my bubble of humanity I’m a pessimist, a black pessimist about the present human world.” “You think it’s going to the bad?” said Jack, still drawing him with the same appearance of deference, of wanting to hear. “Yes, I do. Faster or slower. Probably I shall never see any great change in my lifetime, but the tendency is all downhill, in my opinion. But then I’m a pessimist, so you needn’t bother about my opinion.” Somers wanted to let it all go at that. But Callcott persisted. “Do you think there’ll be more wars? Do you think Germany will be in a position to fight again very soon?” “Bah, you bolster up an old bogey out here. Germany is the bogey of yesterday, not of to-morrow.” “She frightened us out of our sleep before,” said Jack, resentful. “And now, for the time being, she’s done. As a war-machine she’s done, and done for ever. So much scrap-iron, her iron fist.” “You think so?” said Jack, with all the animosity of a returned hero who wants to think his old enemy the one and only bugbear, and who feels quite injured if you tell him there’s no more point in his old hate.