"Don't count on there being anything there that you can follow, Ralph," Dick had told him. "The backbone of that program is military, all that is modern in it is a reminiscence of 1912. Don't deceive yourself. Your party at least is practical enough to admit that there is war on the face of the earth, and that men everywhere must deal with it, which you will not." The convention was a cruel ordeal for Ralph. There he saw go down not only an idol, but the group behind him, in whom he and so great a body had had faith. There he saw shattered his hope of speedily building into party gospel new and kindlier and more just practices between men, greater protection for women and children, enlarged opportunities for happy, satisfied living. Ralph came back from Chicago sore and humble. "It was a cowardly abandonment of something which had come to be for me a religion, Dick. I think it was the greatest thing I ever felt--that thing which happened in 1912. It was to make, what I thought it meant come true, in Sabinsport that I've worked. It's all over. I've no leader and no party. I don't know where I am in the world. I'm utterly lost. What's the matter with me? Tell me square, as you see it. What's the matter, that I can't get my fingers on this war, that I can't feel it my affair? I believe I've got to do that, Dick, or give up the _Argus_--for the war's getting Sabinsport. What ails me?" It was a very humble Ralph that listened to the quiet voice of the man whom he knew to be his best friend, the man who at least had never wavered in affection in these long months when the two had been so asunder in aim and in thought. Dick had taken their differences for granted, he had never disputed, never been angry. It was always possible to talk frankly to Dick without impassioned or angry rejoinders. If that had only been possible with Patsy! Now that Ralph had fairly put the question, "What's the matter with me?" his friend did not spare him. "Egotism is the matter with you, Ralph. You refuse to recognize that a time has come when the world has different interests from those which you think it ought to have. You have been going on the theory that the one thing that is wrong in the world is the corrupt and stupid relation between business and politics which has done so much mischief in this country. So far you have been unwilling to admit that any other form of evil existed on earth and the only way you were willing to fight this was your own way. You had selected your enemy, you had laid out your weapons. You would not consent to see other enemies or other weapons. You have considered every other interest that occupied men and women as an usurper, an intruder. The war called attention away from your fight for righteousness--therefore it must not be tolerated. You refused even to study the catastrophe. You took the easy, intellectual way of the pacifist--war is wrong, therefore I won't try to understand this war.