“The modern girl is a contradiction in terms,” answered Lucien de Grammont. “To modernize yourself is to change; and woman never changes, she only adapts herself.” “She adapted herself in the war, good and plenty,” said Sam Dainton with authority. “She was brought up to know nothing,” rejoined Barbara; “she thought she knew everything. With luck she’ll learn enough to bring her daughters up better than she was brought up herself.” “This from you!,” Violet laughed. “It’s only now that I see what narrow squeaks I had,” said Barbara reflectively. “Whenever a girl makes a mess of her life, I believe it’s the parents who are to blame.” While this theme was developed in the uneasy hearing of my mother, Violet took a last look at my manuscript before handing it back to me. “You say nothing about religion,” she commented in an undertone. “It’s the biggest thing in life for many people.” “For women more than for men,” I submitted. While we were still at school, Darwin, Huxley and Renan were made accessible to us in cheap reprints. I have felt, ever since, that, if my salvation depends on faith in something that ignores ordinary rules of evidence, I would prefer not to be saved. “And you couldn’t have had a bloodier war, if we’d all been followers of Anti-Christ. By a paradox, the only people who tried to live up to their religion were persecuted as conscientious objectors.” “What will you put in its place?,” Violet asked. I should only have hurt her feelings if I had suggested that Christianity might now be given a trial: to her, that faith is synonymous with the Holy Roman Catholic Church; to me, it is the service of man, and the Christian churches with their deadening forms and dead rules, their deferred punishments and rewards, their proscriptions and feuds and exclusive salvations have gone far to stifle Christianity. “If people thought less about the next world,” I answered, “they might make a more tolerable place of this.” And it was in some such words that I ended my criticism of the war. The folly and suspicion and malevolence of all the nations had made it possible; when it came, all the nations engaged in it exhibited much the same endurance, if simultaneously they exhibited much the same savagery. “Well, is it ‘the Great War’ or ‘the Great Waste’?,” Violet asked. “Jim was over age when he gave up the staff. They didn’t want him to go. He felt that every one who got so much out of England in peace _must_ go. _I_ felt that, too. I shouldn’t like to think I’d helped to have him killed for no purpose.”