"We could say the same of the primitive savages. Why should we have advanced beyond the battle-axe and the club?" "Not the political clubs--see here, is there any real advance when the knife goes deep enough? Suppose a thousand English women were butchered in China--or I'll make it Turkey--would your father be for the I.A.L.? If he were, the people would burn his pulpit!" "It only means that we must educate." "We're doing it all the time. Does education make your burglar sing psalms, or does it teach him to use oxygen for burning open the safe? I think nothing of education--that way. Who are the best educated people in Europe? The Germans. Are they coming in to the I.A.L.?" "My father hopes that much may be done by the understanding between the ministers----" He laughed rudely, brutally. "All the sheep baaing together, and the wolf sharpening his teeth on the national grindstone. I've no patience to hear it." "Then I certainly will not repeat it." A flush of anger coloured her cheeks, and her heart began to beat fast. She was conscious of a rôle which fitted her but ill, and was no reflection of herself. How much sooner would she have been downstairs among the well-dressed women who were beginning to flock into the restaurant for lunch! This man's brutal logic threatened to shatter her professed ideals, and to leave her vanity defenceless. She remembered at the same time what the meaning of the triumph would be if she won him. All the country would talk of that! "You are not offended with me?" he said in a gentler tone. "I'm sure you won't be when you get back home and think of it." "I shall try to think of it as little as possible." "As your countrymen are doing. If there was more than half-an-ounce of the radium of common sense in this kingdom at the present moment, some people would be thinking very hard, Miss Silvester----" "Of what?" He rose from his chair, thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets, went over to the window and stood looking out. "They would be thinking of the frost," he said. "Perhaps it is too cold to think about it!" He laughed. "Well said and true. Did you read in the _Times_ that there is ice in the English Channel for the first time for twenty years?" "I never read the _Times_----" "Then don't begin if you would remain a woman." "Is she, then, unworthy of it?" "Not at all--it is unworthy of her. It tells the truth!" "Oh, I grant that that is embarrassing sometimes. We were speaking of the frost." "And the fables. The fable, written by a great German, is about to freeze the English Channel and the North Sea! Ice from the Humber to Kiel! Portsmouth frozen up. An ice carnival at the Thames' mouth. Do you believe in fables?" She stared at him amazed. "What would happen if this one were true?" "Oh," he said, "you had better ask the I.A.L." She was silent a little while, then she said: "Your bogies are wonderful. Are there many in your life?" "More than I count." "They are lucky then?"