Mr. BROWNELL: What, six? Then he has more readers than can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are only five fingers on a hand. I think this is conclusive. Mr. BOYNTON: Oh, decidedly. Mr. FOLLETT: But I put him in my book on modern novelists, all of whom were hand picked. Mr. GALSWORTHY (_with much calmness for one uttering a terrible heresy_): Perhaps that’s the difficulty, really. All hand picked. Do you know, I rather believe in literary windfalls. But I beg to withdraw. (_And he does._) THE CLERK: Herbert George Wells! Mr. WELLS (_sauntering up and speaking with a certain inattention_): Respecting my long novel, Joan and Peter, there are some points that need to be made clear. Peter, you know, is called Petah by Joan. Petah is a sapient fellow. He is even able to admire the Germans because, after all, they knew where they were going, they knew what they were after, their education had them headed for something. It had, indeed. I think Petah overlooks the fact that it had headed them for Paris in 1914. The point that Oswald and I make in the book is that England and the Empire, in 1914 and prior thereto, had not been headed for anything, educationally or otherwise, except Littleness in every field of political endeavor, except Stupidity in every province of human affairs. And the proof of this, we argue, is found in the first three years of the Great War. No doubt. The first three years of the war prove so many things that this may well be among them; don’t you think so? Without detracting from the damning case which Oswald and I make out against England it does occur to me, as I poke over my material for a new book, that as the proof of a pudding is in the eating so the proof of a nation at war is in the fighting. Indisputable as the bankruptcy of much British leadership has been, indisputable as it is that General Gough lost tens of thousands of prisoners, hundreds of guns and vast stores of ammunition, it is equally indisputable that the Australians who died like flies at the Dardanelles died like men, that the Tommies who were shot by their own guns at Neuve Chapelle went forward like heroes, that the undersized and undernourished and unintellectual Londoners from Whitechapel who fell in Flanders gave up their immortal souls like freemen and Englishmen and kinsmen of the Lion Heart. And if it comes to a question as to the blame for the war as distinguished from the question as to the blame for the British conduct of the war, the latter being that with which _Joan and Peter_ is almost wholly concerned, I should like to point out now, on behalf of myself and the readers of my next book, that perhaps I am not entirely blameless. Perhaps I bear an infinitesimal portion of the terrible responsibility which I have showed some unwillingness to place entirely and clearly on Germany.