“There’s a—nightmare. An overweening muscular impulse to jump on the thing that’s scared us in the dark, to break it with our hands, grind it into the ground with our heels, tear ourselves away from it—and wake up.” He went on again after a moment of silence. “Yes, that’s it, that’s it. We’ve never asked for anything better; not once since those terrible August days have we got down on our naked knees and prayed for anything more than just to be allowed to wake up—and find it isn’t so. How can we expect, with a desire like that, to stand against a positive and a flaming desire? No, no! The only thing to beat a dream is a dream more poignant. The only thing to beat a vision black as midnight is a vision white as the noonday sun. We’ve come to the place, doctor, where half a loaf is worse than no bread.” The doctor put his hands in his pockets and took them out again, shifted away a few steps and back again. He felt inarticulate, handless, helpless in the face of things, of abstractions, of the mysterious, unflagging swiftness of the ship, bearing him willy-nilly over the blind surface of the sea. He shook himself. “God help us,” he said. “What God?” The doctor lifted a weary hand. “Oh, if you’re going into _that_—” “Why not? Because Prussia, doctor, has a god. Prussia has a god as terrible as the God of conquering Israel, a god created in her own image. We laugh when we hear her speaking intimately and surely to this god. I tell you we’re fools. I tell you, doctor, before we shall stand we shall have to create a god in _our_ own image, and before we do that we shall have to have a living and sufficient image.” “You don’t think much of us,” the doctor murmured wearily. The other seemed not to hear. After a little while he said: “We’ve got to say black or white at last. We’ve got to answer a question this time with a whole answer.”