The next morning, looking out of his window early, he saw David in his bathing suit trying, with a seriousness that might have drilled a company, to teach a new handspring to Lawrence. And this made it impossible for Mr. Brougham to be silent any longer. When David came back to the house, dressed, but with his hair still dark and wet from his swim, his father stopped him. "Sit down a minute," he said. "I want to speak to you. I want you to explain your attitude toward this war." This opening sentence, which he had thought of while the handsprings were going on, would have been excellent if he could have given his son time to answer it, but he couldn't; his emotions swept him on, and at the end of five minutes he was still talking: "The Civil War was fought by boys your age or younger. I don't say it was best, but it's the fact. And here you are--you've had every advantage--of education, of luxury, of protection. Don't you care for the traditions of your country? You're not a child any more. You're old enough to understand that a hideous catastrophe has come upon the world, and before long you must take your part in remedying it. What's your attitude to the war?" "I think we're going to win it, sir, in the end." "Other people are going to win it?" "Would you approve of my enlisting at once? I understood--" "No, I would not approve of it, as I've told you," answered his father, feeling that somehow he was being unjustly cornered. "But because a man's too young to make a soldier, that doesn't mean he shouldn't have any patriotism in his make-up--should be absolutely indifferent, with his head full of handsprings and jazz bands." "I'm not indifferent," said David; "and as for jazz bands, even the men at the Front like them." "But you're not at the Front--if you get my point." "I don't believe I do," said David. Civil as David's tone was there was of course a trace of hostility in the words themselves, and in his distress Mr. Brougham decided to go and consult Granby, the head of the school where David had been for five years and where Lawrence still was. Brougham only went to Granby in desperate straits, for he was a little afraid of his son's schoolmaster. Granby was a tall bald man of fifty, with an expression at once stern and humble--stern with the habit of innumerable decisions, humble with the consciousness that half of them had been wrong. Brougham admired him, but could not be his friend, owing to the fact that he always became in Granby's presence an essential parent and nothing else. Mrs. Brougham, with the protection of her long silences, managed better to retain her individuality in his presence. "I've come to consult you about David," he began. Granby visibly shrank. "Don't tell me he's gone too!" "No--he hasn't; that's it." Brougham managed to tell his story very satisfactorily, for Granby had the power, rarer than is supposed, of extracting an idea from spoken words.