On top of that shock events combined to rebuke his recent confidence. His desires had taken too much for granted. The folly of the Mrs. Alstons and the wisdom of the Baillys and Sinclairs were forced upon him. Wilson wasn't going to keep them out of it. George stood face to face with the decision he had shirked when the _Lusitania_ had taken her fatal dive. It couldn't be shirked again, for the declaration of war appeared to be a matter of days, weeks at the most. The drum was beginning to sound with a rising resonance. Lambert and Goodhue would be among the first to leave. Already they made their plans. They didn't seem to care what became of the business. "What are you up to, George?" they asked. He put them off. He wanted to think it out. He didn't care to have his decision blurred by the rattling of a drum. Yet it was patent to him if he should go at all it would be with his partners, among the first. The thought of such a triple desertion appalled him. Mundy was incomparable for system and routine, but if he had possessed the rare selective foresight demanded for the steering of a big business he would long since have been at the helm of his own house. It would be far better, if George had to go, to sell the stock and the mass of soaring securities the firm had acquired; in short, to close out before competitors could squeeze the abandoned ship from the channel. Why dwell on so wasteful an alternative? Why not turn sanely from so sentimental a choice? It was clear enough to him that it would not long survive the war, all this singing and shouting, this driving forth by older people on the winds of a safe enthusiasm of countless young men to grotesque places of death. He paced his room. That was just it. It was the present he had to consider, and the present thoughts of people who hadn't yet returned to their inevitable practicality, forgetfulness, and ingratitude; most of all to the present thoughts of Sylvia. To him she had made those thoughts sufficiently plain. Among non-combatant enthusiasts she would be the most exigent. Why swing from choice to choice any longer? To be as he had fancied she would wish, he had struggled, denied, kept himself clean, sought minutely for the proper veneer; and so far he had kept his record straight. With her it was his one weapon. He couldn't throw that away. He stopped his pacing. He sat before his desk, his head in his hands, listening to the cacophanous beating of drums by the majority for the anxious marching of a few. It was settled. He had always known it would be, in just that way. XXI George took his physical examination at Governor's Island with the earliest of the candidates for the First Officers' Training Camp. As soon as he had returned to his office he wrote to Bailly: "I'm going to your cheerful war, after all. I'll drop in the end of the week." He summoned Lambert and Goodhue. Until then he had told them nothing definite.