It was the kind of advance and recession with which I had least patience. On Thursday morning I kept no watch for her. Swearing that she meant no more to me than Miss Prynne and that my work in life was too serious to allow any woman to interfere with it, I gave myself to the reading of books on the war situation as it affected America. If she was playing a game, she would learn that it was not one of solitaire. Two could take a hand at it, and with equal skill. I prided myself on that skill when sometime in the latter part of Thursday afternoon she passed my chair in the music-room—the sixth sense told me it was she—and I did not look up from Sheering’s Oxford lectures on “The War and World Repentance.” Though my eye followed the passage, I got little or no sense from it. “Human effort after human welfare is never drastic enough,” I read. “It is never sufficiently radical to accomplish the purpose it tries to carry out. Instead of laying its ax at the root of the tree of its ills it is content to hack off a few branches. It never gets beyond pruning-work; and the most one can say of the results it achieves is that they are better than nothing. “So much, then, one can affirm of the dreams that are now being dreamed, in all probability to vanish with waking. They are better than nothing. Better than nothing are the aims held up before the Allied nations as the citadels they are to capture. The crushing of military despotism is better than nothing; the elimination of war is better than nothing; the establishment of universal democracy, the founding of a league of nations, the formation of a league to enforce peace, the dissemination of a world-wide entente, these are all of them better than nothing, even though they end in being no more productive of permanent blessing than the Hague Conference, which was better than nothing in itself. They are probably as effective as anything that man, with his reason, his wisdom, his science, his degree of self-control, and his pathetic persistence in believing in himself when that belief has so unfailingly been blasted, can ever attain to. But, oh, gentlemen, as the prophet said thirty centuries ago, ‘This is not the way, neither is this the city.’ You are pouring out blood; you are pouring out money; you are giving your sons and your daughters to pass through the fire to Moloch; through the fire to Moloch unflinchingly they pass; you are tearing the hearts out of your own bodies, and you are doing it with a heroism that cannot fail of some reward. But this is not the way, neither is this the city. It is better than nothing, but it is not the best. You could do it all so much more thoroughly, so much more easily. You will accomplish something; there is no question about that; but till you take the right way, and attack the city of which you must become masters, that great good thing for which you are fighting will still be a vision of the future.”