Daphne took Alix from Violette to stay with her at her club. It was the end of November. Daphne proposed that they should spend a fortnight in town, till the end of the art school term, then go down to their house at Cambridge for the Christmas vacation. She meant to spend this period holding meetings about the county of Cambridgeshire with a view to starting village branches of the Society for Promoting Permanent Peace. Meetings--branches--study circles--this was the machinery behind the ideals. Daphne, at times irrelevant, inconsequent, prejudiced, whimsical, perverse, was an idealist and a business woman. She made Alix come to meetings while they were in town. She saw in Alix the raw material of a member of the S.P.P.P. She said, 'You mustn't be selfish, darling. You are a little selfish, you know, and you're old enough now to leave it off. You try to hide from things, like an ostrich. You try and pretend they don't exist. In point of fact, they do, and you know it. You know it all the time: you can't forget it, so you waste your trouble trying. You must leave that to the Violettes. They can ignore. You can't.... Ignoring: that's always been the curse of this world. We shut our eyes to things--poverty, and injustice, and vice, and cruelty, and sweating, and slums, and the tendencies which make war, and we feed ourselves on batter, and so go on from day to day getting a little fatter--and so the evils too go on from day to day getting fatter, till they get so corpulent and heavy that when we do open our eyes at last, because we have to, they can scarcely be moved at all. It's sheer criminal selfishness and laziness and stupidity. Mr. West was talking about it the other day. I like that young man; he believes in all the right things. And in so many of the wrong ones as well--I can't imagine why. I told him I couldn't imagine why; and he said he found the same difficulty about me. So there we are. However, what was I saying? Oh yes--laziness, selfishness and stupidity. It's those three we've got to fight. We've got to replace them by hard working, hard living, and hard thinking. And the last must come first. We've got to _think_, and make every one think.... One of the worst things about a war is that so many of the best thinkers are in the middle of it, and can't think, and may never be able to think again. I don't in the least agree with those complacent young men and women who believe that no one over forty either can or will think. 'The war has let the old men loose upon the world,' I believe is the phrase. Conceited rubbish, of course. They won't talk it when they and their friends are forty-eight, like me. Personally I know just about as many young fools and obscurantists and militarists as elderly ones. Any number of both. It's not a question of age; it's temperament and training. But still, grant that the young men of fighting age form a very large proportion in each nation of the clearest intellects and the