Rose Carburton held her ground bravely. “It is a heroic attempt to adjust the balance of power. Certain minds in the world of public affairs--and it is only one world among many--are now in full control of the wires which hold society together. These minds stand for negation. At the beck of private ambition of an ignoble kind, they are prepared to override all that is human, all that is divine. So long as they can fill the world with war and the rumor of war they thrive. In the end, of course, Fate itself will deal with them, but only at an awful cost to the helpless and the innocent. Had society had the power in 1912 to remove Wilhelm II and the small group of men around him, it is almost certain that the cataclysm which has so nearly destroyed the civilization of the West would have been averted.” Saul Hartz took leave to doubt it. XXVII Dinner that evening was again a cheerless meal. It was hard to say why. All that wealth, discriminating taste, the social arts could devise was there in profusion. There was an absence of ceremony. Taken as individuals nothing could have exceeded the personal attraction of those who graced the famous Doe Hill mahogany, but in a subtle way and for some hidden reason they refused to coalesce. Some of the foremost minds of the world had come together. On a normal occasion the talk of such people must have been copious, salt, full of marrow; this evening it was tentative, halting, spineless; the hearts and minds of the speakers were too plainly not in it. A skeleton was at the feast. Of that fact Saul Hartz was fully aware. From the moment of arrival the previous day a deadly sense of being in the enemy’s camp had oppressed him. All that had happened since, outwardly unimportant though it was, had ministered to it. Each one of these people, even the hostess herself seemed, so far as possible, to avoid him. They were forever looking the other way; even in moments of unavoidable intercourse he felt an odd constraint. And this evening, in spite of the _mise en scene_, an almost positive sense of disharmony reached a climax. Course by course the conversation waned. By the time the meal was at an end, silence hung like a pall over the whole table. When the ladies left the room, the eight men who remained were conscious of a momentary lifting of the cloud. But they stayed only a short time circulating the decanters. A move was made once more to that wonderful room, the library, whose walls had been furnished so liberally with the world’s wisdom, for the most part in bindings choice and rare. The somber magnificence of the drawn curtains, the soft radiance of the candelabra, the glow from the open hearth, lent to the scene an austere dignity that was felt by all. Coffee and cigars, and even the fine liqueurs which were promptly dispensed, came almost as a desecration to such a sacramental atmosphere.