'Glad you approved,' she said. 'The S.P.P.P. _is_ rather sensible, on the whole: just that.... What about joining it, on those grounds? It will only bind you to approve of its general programme, and, when you can, assist in it. And its programme is really purely educational--training people (beginning with ourselves) in the kind of thinking and principles which seem to make for international understanding and peace. You'd better join us. We're fighting war, to the best of our lights, and with the weapons at our command. One can't do more than that in these days, and one can scarcely do less. One mayn't be very successful, and one may be quite off the lines; but one has to keep trying in the best way one personally knows. One can't be indifferent and inert nowadays.... Well?' Alix leant forward and dropped her cigarette end into the fire. 'Well,' she returned, and thought for a moment, and added, 'I wonder. I'm not really good at joining things, you know.' 'You are not,' Daphne agreed, decisively. 'You sit on hedges, criticising the fields on both sides and wondering what good either of them is going to be to you. Such a paltry attitude, my dear! Unpractical, selfish, and sentimental; though I know you think you hate sentimentality. It's quite time you learnt that there's no fighting with whole truths in this life, and all we can do is to seize fragments of truth where we can find them, and use them as best we can. Poor weapons, perhaps, but all we've got. That's how I see it, anyhow.... Well, darling, at least it can't do any _harm_ to try and get children and grown-up people taught to get some understanding of international politics and the ways to keep the peace, or to look upon arbitration as a possible, practical, and natural substitute for war--can it, now? If it only in the end results in improving ever so slightly the mental attitude of a person here and there, adding ever so little to the political information of a village in each county, it will have done _something_, won't it? And--you never know--it may do quite a lot more than that. You must remember we've got branches in all the belligerent countries now. Free discussion of these things gets them into the air, so to speak; trains people's ways of thought; and thought, collective thought, is such a solid driving-power; it gets things done. Thoughts are alive,' said Daphne, waving her cigarette as she talked, 'frightfully, terrifyingly, amazingly alive. They fly about like good and bad germs; they cause health or disease. They can build empires or slums; they can assault and hurt the soul' (unconsciously in moments of enthusiasm, Daphne sometimes used a prayer-book phrase stored in her memory cells from childhood, for her father had been a bishop), 'or they can save it alive. They can make peace and make war. They made _this_ war: they must make the new peace. Thought is _everything_. We've got to make good, sane, intelligent thought, how ever and where ever we can, all of us....