cious
seedy.'

'I feel all right.'

'You don't look it.'

'I have been very busy, Doug.'

'Glad to hear it. Putting over a killing in the literature game?'

'The biggest thing yet,' said Selwyn, opening a drawer and searching
for the cigars. 'I am making a sincere attempt to write something
which will sway people. Have one of these?'

'Thanks. I guess I'd better smoke one while I have the chance. It
might get the sergeant-major's goat if he found a buck private smoking
half-crown cigars.'

'You haven't joined the army?'

'Not yet; but I shall to-morrow. You can do it by graft, old boy. For
three weeks I've courted a colonel's daughter so as to get next to the
old man, and to-morrow I receive my reward. I am to become a
full-fledged Tommy Atkins.'

'And the daughter?'

The younger man grinned and cut off the end of his cigar with a
pocket-knife. 'Can you see the colonel's daughter "walking out" with a
Tommy? My dear Austin, patriotism excuses much, but the social code
must be maintained. I'd render that in Latin if I wasn't so rusty on
languages. What are the chances of your coming along with me tomorrow?'

Selwyn reached for an ash-tray and matches.

'America is neutral,' he said quietly.

'America is not neutral,' replied Watson with a decisiveness that one
would hardly have suspected to lie beneath the calm exterior and the
veneer of good-breeding polished by Cambridge associations--a veneer
that made his occasional lapses into crudity of language seem oddly out
of place. 'The German-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the
Jewish-Americans, the God-knows-who-else-Americans may be neutral, but
the America of Washington and Lincoln, the America of Lee and Grant,
isn't neutral. Not by a long sight.'

'Doug,' said Selwyn reproachfully, 'you are the last man I thought
would be caught by this flag-waving, drum-beating stuff.'

The younger man's brows puckered as he looked through the haze of
tobacco-smoke at his host. 'Austin,' he said abruptly, 'you've
changed.'

'Yes,' said Selwyn thoughtfully. He was going to say more, but,
changing his mind, remained silent.

'I thought you looked different,' went on Watson. 'What's up?'

Selwyn's eyes narrowed and his lips and jaw stiffened resolutely. 'I
am writing,' he said, enunciating each word distinctly, 'in the hope of
arousing the slumbering conscience of the world against this war.'

'Canute the Second,' commented Watson dryly.

'Doug,