She picked up an illustrated paper and opened it at a page filled by an ornate picture. “See!” she said. “It is because he himself has made it so easy, with his amazing portraits of his big boots, and swords, and eruption of dangling orders. How can one help but smile when one finds him glaring at one from a newspaper in his superwarlike attitude, defying the Universe, with his comic moustachios and their ferocious waxed and bristling ends. No! One can scarcely believe that a man can be stupid enough not to realize that he looks as if he had deliberately made himself up to represent a sort of terrific military bogey intimating that, at any moment, he may pounce and say ‘Boo!” “There lies the peril. His pretensions seem too grotesque to be treated seriously. And, while he should be watched as a madman is watched, he is given a lifetime to prepare for attack on a world that has ceased to believe in the sole thing which is real to himself.” “You are fresh from observation.” There was new alertness in her eyes, though she had listened before. “I tell you it _grows!_” he gave back and lightly struck the table in emphasis. “Do you remember Carlyle—?” “The French Revolution again?” “Yes. Do you recall this? ‘Do not fires, fevers, seeds, chemical mixtures, _go on growing_. Observe, too, that _each grows_ with a rapidity proportioned to the madness and unhealthiness there is in it.’ A ruler who, in an unaggressive age such as this, can concentrate his life and his people’s on the one ambition of plunging the world in an ocean of blood, in which his own monomania can bathe in triumph—Good God! there is madness and unhealthiness to flourish in!” “The world!” she said. “Yes—it will be the world.”