"Well, the only person I've really seen is yourself," he answered. "And I can't help staring at you in some bewilderment, due less to fever than to the concatenations of fortune. What seems to me so amusing and odd is that, if you had known we were cousins, you couldn't have behaved in a more cousinly way than you did over Lily." "When I found myself in that hospital at Petrograd," Sylvia declared, "I felt like the Sleeping Beauty being waked by the magic kiss--" she broke off, blushing hotly and cursing inwardly her damned self-consciousness; and then blushed again because she had stopped to wonder if he had noticed her blush. "I don't think anything that happened during this war to me personally," Michael said, "could ever make any impression now. The war itself always presents itself to me as a mighty fever, caught, if you will, by taking foolish risks or ignoring simple precautions, but ultimately and profoundly inevitable in the way that one feels all illness to be inevitable. Anything particular that happens to the individual must lose its significance in the change that he must suffer from the general calamity. I think perhaps that as a Catholic I am tempted to be less hopeful of men and more hopeful of God, but yet I firmly believe that I am more hopeful of men than the average--shall we call him humanitarian, who perceives in this war nothing but a crime against human brotherhood committed by a few ambitious knaves helped by a crowd of ambitious fools? I'm perfectly sure, for instance, that there is no one alive and no one dead that does not partake of the responsibility. However little it may be realized in the case of individuals, nothing will ever persuade me that one of the chief motive forces that maintain this state of destruction to which the world is being devoted is not a sense of guilt and a determination to expiate it. Mark you, I'm not trying to urge that God has judicially sentenced the world to war, dealing out horror to Belgium for the horror of the Congo, horror to Serbia for the horror of the royal assassination, horror to France, England, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia for their national lapses from grace--I should be very sorry to implicate Almighty God in any conception based upon our primitive notions of justice. The only time I feel that God ever interfered with humanity was when He was incarnate among us, and the story of that seems to forbid us our attribution to Him of anything in the nature of fretful castigation. The most presumptuous attitude in this war seems to me the German idea of God in a _pickelhaube_, of Christ bound to an Iron Cross, and of the Dove as a bloody-minded Eagle; but the Allies' notion of the Pope as a kind of diplomat with a license to excommunicate seems to me only less presumptuous." "Then you think the war is in every human heart?" Sylvia asked. "When I look at my own I'm positive it is." "But do you think it was inevitable because it was salutary?"