"I think blood-letting is old-fashioned surgery: aren't you confusing the disease with the remedy? Surely no disease is salutary, and I think it's morally dangerous to confuse effect with cause. At the same time I'm not going to lay down positively that this war may not be extremely salutary. I think it will be, but I acquit God of any hand in its deliberate ordering. Free will must apply to nations. I don't believe that war which, while it brings out often the best of people, brings out much more often the worst is to be regarded as anything but a vile exhibition of human sin. The selflessness of those who have died is terribly stained by the selfishness of those who have let them die. Yet the younger generation, or such of it as survives, will have the compensation when it is all over of such amazing opportunities for living as were never known, and the older generation that made the war will die less lamented than any men that have ever died since the world began. And I believe that their purgatory will be the grayest and the longest of all the purgatories. But as soon as I have said that I regret my words, because I think it will be fatal for the younger generation to become precocious Pharisees; and so I reiterate that the war is in every human heart, and you're not to tempt me any more into making harsh judgments about any one." "Not even the great Victorians?" said Sylvia. "Well, that will be a difficult and very penitential piece of self-denial, I admit. And it is hard not to hope that Carlyle is in hell. However, I can just avoid doing so, because I shall certainly go to hell myself if I do, where his Teutonic borborygmi would be an added woe, gigantic genius though he was. But don't let's joke about hell. It's--infernally credible since August, 1914. What were we talking about before we began to talk about the war? Oh, I remember--the new world that one gets up to face after a bad illness." "Perhaps my experience was peculiar," Sylvia said. But what did it matter how he regarded the world, she thought, unless he regarded her? Already the topic was exhausted; he was tired by his vehemence; once more the ruthless and precipitate hour had gone by.