In the gathering dusk I could distinguish nothing but the gloomy contours of Stonehenge and the sharp, black outline of innumerable government huts. Then I saw O’Rane prick up his ears at the tramp of weary feet. “Anywhere you like,” he answered, as a white-faced army advanced into the glare of my lamps. “I was in camp here in ’14. It’s a dam’ bad step. Recruits, I suppose. We should have been given hell if we hadn’t been smarter than that.” As the column approached, I saw fifty or sixty men in tattered civilian clothes. Two or three wore medals; the rest had a brave line of ribbons on their coats. At their head marched two standard-bearers with the adequate device: “_Wanted in 1914. Not wanted now._” “They’ve had their hell; and they’re not through with it yet,” I said. It was the first time that I had encountered the searing reproach of that device; and, as I described it to O’Rane, I recalled—as in a dream of some other life—that I was the editor of a political review and that I had been sent to study unemployment. There was an external world, then. At this moment my uncle was probably taking the chair at our weekly dinner. As the tramp of feet grew fainter, O’Rane half rose in his seat and then subsided with a groan: “No, I _can’t_! It’s _not_ my business to pay other people’s debts. The state turned these men into soldiers, in a moment of blue funk; the state must turn them back into civilians. Sometimes I see so red that I want to hold this country to ransom. ‘You’ve no use for these fellows,’ I want to say. ‘Well, now I’m going to shew you what would have happened if they hadn’t come forward when they did.’ After a week of Belgian atrocities, there’d be a marked increase in popular gratitude! And I thought this war would produce a . . . spirit of fraternity!” I had hoped for it, even if I had not expected it after the first months of 1915. Quick conversions are never permanent: and permanent conversions are never quick. Our drive that day, past great estates and big manufacturing towns, might have been chosen as an object-lesson in the aggressive competition that strangles fraternity at birth. That night, when we lay at Gloucester, and next day, as we drove through the soul-searching loveliness of the Stroud valley, we talked of education and the gospel of humanity, as we had not talked since our Indian summer at Cannes; and once or twice, for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, I forgot to think consciously of Barbara. H. G. Wells, after years of criticism, was turning teacher on his own account; and _The Outline of History_ was conspicuous in every house and railway carriage I entered at this time. One man at least was pleading for the universal spirit; and his plea gave food for thought to the people who had shouted for blood and gold in the 1918 election. The havoc which Keynes had made in the economics of the peace-treaty was completed by the havoc which Wells made of its history and its spiritual trend.