a man who
has spent two years in the trenches. One cannot imagine the lyre of
Apollo attuned to What's-the-name's marches."

"Two years," echoed Paul; "is it really two years since we met?"

"Two years on June the twenty-second. On June the twenty-second,
nineteen hundred and fifteen, you saw me off from Victoria of hateful
memory. I have been home six or seven times in the interval, but somehow
or other have always missed you. I was appalled when I heard you had
joined. God knows we need such brains as yours, but they would be wasted
on the Somme; and genius is too rare to be exposed to the sniper's
bullet. What are you doing?"

The sympathy between the two was so perfect that Paul Mario knew the
question to refer not to his private plans but to his part in the world
drama.

"Beyond daily descending lower in my own esteem--nothing."

"Yet you might do so much."

"I know," said Paul Mario. "But--it awes me."

If his work had not already proved him, the genius of the man must have
been rendered apparent by his entire lack of false modesty. Praise and
censure alike left him uninfluenced--although few artists can exist
without a modicum of the former: he knew himself born to sway the minds
of millions and was half fearful of his self-knowledge. "I know," he
said, and pipe in hand he gazed wistfully across the valley.

A faint breeze crept through the fir avenue, bearing with it a muffled
booming sound which was sufficient to raise the curtain of
distance--never truly opaque for such as he--and to display to that
acute inner vision a reeking battlefield. Before his shuddering soul
defiled men maimed, blind, bleeding from ghastly hurts; men long dead.
Women he saw in lowly hovels, weeping over cots fashioned from rough
boxes; women, dry-eyed, mutely tragic, surrounded by softness, luxury
and servitude, wearing love gifts of a hand for ever stilled, dreaming
of lover-words whispered in a voice for ever mute. He seemed to float
spiritually over the whole world upon that wave of sound and to find the
whole world stricken, desolate, its fairness mockery and its music a
sob.

"At the moment, no doubt," said Don, "you feel as though you had been
knocked out of the ring in the first round. But this phase will pass.
The point is, that you never had any business in the ring at all. No
quarrel ever actually begins with a blow, and no quarrel was ever
terminated by one. Genius--perverted, I'll grant you, but nevertheless
ge