Ivy failed to imagine this; her attention was occupied with the End House seat. The train's last journey had been too much for the tottering self-control of the Grammont family and Vernon Prideaux (nothing ever broke down Mr. Amherst's self-control, and Pansy's thoughts were elsewhere). Prideaux's head rested on his hand, as if he were lost in thought; Kitty and Anthony were shaking, unobtrusively but unmistakably, and Cyril's fine, supercilious chin, set firmly, was quivering. Cyril had, from childhood, had more self-control than the other two, and he was further sustained by his conviction that it would be unthinkably bad form for a Catholic to attend a Protestant service and laugh at it in public. They oughtn't, thought Ivy, rather indignantly, to laugh at her father's sermon when he wasn't meaning to be funny. If he saw he would be hurt. One shouldn't laugh in church, anyhow; even Jane and John knew that. These people were no better than Jelly. "This Sunday," continued the Vicar, his last star journey safely accomplished, "is the day that has been set aside by our country for prayer and sermons with regard to the proposed increase in the national brain-power. This is, indeed, a sore need: but let us start on the firm foundation of religion. What is wisdom apart from that? Nothing but vanity and emptiness. What is the clever godless man but a fool from the point of view of eternity? What is the godly fool but a heavenly success?" ("He's talking sedition," whispered Kitty to Prideaux. "He'd better have stuck to the trains.") But, of course, the vicar continued, if one can combine virtue and intelligence, so much the better. It has been done. There was, e.g. Darwin. Also General Gordon, St. Paul, and Lord Roberts, who had said with his last breath, in June, 1915, "We've got the men, we've got the money, we've got the munitions; what we now want is a nation on its knees." (Ivy saw Prideaux sit up very straight, as if he would have liked to inform Mr. Delmer that this libel on a dying soldier had long since been challenged and withdrawn.) One can, said the vicar, find many more such examples of this happy combination of virtue and intelligence. There was Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, and Lord Rhondda (who in the dark days of famine had led the way in self-denial). Not, unfortunately, the Emperor Napoleon, Friedrich Nietzsche, or the Kaiser Wilhelm II. The good are not always the clever, nor the clever always the good. Some are neither, like the late Crown Prince of Germany (who was now sharing a small island in the Pacific with the Kaiser Wilhelm and MM. Lenin and Trotzky, late of Petrograd, and neither stupid nor exactly, let us hope, bad, but singularly unfortunate and misguided, like so many Russians, whom it is not for us to judge).