ll win. If it's a
short war the Germans will win, and it will be the end of France as a
great power. That's all."

"Won't it be the end of your factory too?"

"Noh!" exclaimed Sir Isaac, with careless compassion in his deep, viscid
voice. "If it's a short war, there'll be another war. You English will
never leave it alone. So that whatever happens, if I take up explosives,
I can't go wrong. It's velvet."

"It seems to me we shall bust up the whole world if we aren't careful,
soon."

Sir Isaac smiled more compassion.

"Not at all," he said easily. "Not at all. Things are always arranged in
the end--more or less satisfactorily, of course. It's up to the
individual to look out for himself."

George said:

"I was thinking of going into the Army."

The statement was not strictly untrue, but he had never formulated it,
and he had never thought consecutively of such a project, which did
indeed appear too wild and unpractical for serious consideration.

"This recruiting's been upsetting you."

George's vague patriotism seemed to curdle at these half-dozen scornful
words.

"Do you think I oughtn't to go into the Army, Sir Isaac?"

"My dear boy, any----can go into the Army. And if you go into the Army
you'll lose your special qualities. I see you as the best factory
designer we have, architecturally. You've only just started, but you
have it in you. And your barracks is pretty good. Of course, if you
choose to indulge in sentimentality you can deprive the country of an
architect in a million and make it a present of a mediocre soldier--for
you haven't got the mind of a soldier. But if you do that, mark my
words--you'll only do it to satisfy the egotism that you call your
heart, you'll only do it in order to feel comfortable; just as a woman
gives a penny to a beggar and thinks it's charity when it's nothing of
the sort. There are fellows that go and enlist because they hear a band
play."

"Yes," George concurred. He hated to feel himself confronted by a mind
more realistic than his own, but he was realistic enough to admit the
fact. What Sir Isaac said was unanswerable, and it appealed very
strongly to George. He cast away his sentimentality, ashamed of it. And
at the same time he felt greatly relieved in other ways.

"You'd better put this Indian barracks on one side as much as you can,
or employ some one to help you. I shall want all your energies."

"But I shall probably have to go to India. The thing's ver