"That is all very well; but in fact you believe neither in beauty nor in justice!" "I believe in the passionate endeavor of man toward beauty and justice." "Which he will never attain?" La Villaumer suddenly changed his tone, and gazing smilingly upon the young woman said: "That would be paradise, my dear friend; be reasonable!" XIV It was the last hour of an April afternoon; budding foliage on the trees, the Arc de Triomphe, upon which every saunterer who looks to-day, looks with the vision of the triumphal procession to come, and the Champs-Elysées, unequalled promenade, which Odette and La Villaumer had so often seen crowded and joyful, in the days when the world was happy. "Do you remember? Oh, you were a little girl, loving to hang around Guignol and trail after the goat-carts. But I was then no longer very young. Do you remember the time when there were no automobiles, and when the victorias used to go slowly down the street bearing beautifully dressed women whom one had time to admire, to criticise, to recognize, and salute? The auto is perfect, but the best it can do is to rush from one place to another, and that has by no means the interest of the daily procession, when it seemed that every one still had time to live. Excuse my capricious imagination, but it seems to me that these machines were made just to bring us with all the more haste to the frightful time in which we are living. I dare say this to you because I know that you are not going to remind me that autos are rendering admirable service to the war, especially at this very time. You think, like me, that they also render service to our enemies, and that all these rapid means of reaching the battlefield coincide with a war without a conceivable end. In a general way, scientific inventions--don't confuse them with the sciences, which merit all veneration--conspire to give to this war a character of atrocity to which no armed conflict has ever attained, and I wish that it could be proved to me that they alleviate it in equal proportion. Think only of the horror which this 'progress' in the art of extermination inspires. How many brains are unable to resist it? Civilians are dying every day, and the best of them, who go to pieces merely from imagining the war. We see them fall like the hollow bark which still seems to support a tree. You yourself did not know in your childhood the amazement that Jules Verne's 'Nautilus' caused. But you witnessed the crazy conduct of your contemporaries the first time they saw an airship sailing about in the air. It was pretty, to be sure, and the audacity of the early pilots roused us all to enthusiasm. Recall to mind the saying that was current on the greensward at Deauville when twelve airplanes arrived from Havre, three hundred metres above the earth, all rosy in the sunset rays. 'The flying Peace,' some one said. I shrugged my shoulders sorrowfully, because I know that in the face of