to win, and he wanted
America to abandon a course that he believed was vitally necessary to
their victory. It was an intellectual dilemma. He hid this
self-contradiction from Matching's Easy with much the same feelings that
a curate might hide a poisoned dagger at a tea-party....

It was entirely against his habits of mind to hide anything--more
particularly an entanglement with a difficult proposition--but he
perceived quite clearly that neither Cecily nor Mr. Britling were really
to be trusted to listen calmly to what, under happier circumstances,
might be a profoundly interesting moral complication. Yet it was not in
his nature to conceal; it was in his nature to state.

And Cecily made things much more difficult. She was pitiless with him.
She kept him aloof. "How can I let you make love to me," she said, "when
our English men are all going to the war, when Teddy is a prisoner and
Hugh is in the trenches. If I were a man--!"

She couldn't be induced to see any case for America. England was
fighting for freedom, and America ought to be beside her. "All the
world ought to unite against this German wickedness," she said.

"I'm doing all I can to help in Belgium," he protested. "Aren't I
working? We've fed four million people."

He had backbone, and he would not let her, he was resolved, bully him
into a falsehood about his country. America was aloof. She was right to
be aloof.... At the same time, Cecily's reproaches were unendurable. And
he could feel he was drifting apart from her....

_He_ couldn't make America go to war.

In the quiet of his London hotel he thought it all out. He sat at a
writing-table making notes of a perfectly lucid statement of the
reasonable, balanced liberal American opinion. An instinct of caution
determined him to test it first on Mr. Britling.

But Mr. Britling realised his worst expectations. He was beyond
listening.

"I've not heard from my boy for more than three weeks," said Mr.
Britling in the place of any salutation. "This morning makes
three-and-twenty days without a letter."

It seemed to Mr. Direck that Mr. Britling had suddenly grown ten years
older. His face was more deeply lined; the colour and texture of his
complexion had gone grey. He moved restlessly and badly; his nerves were
manifestly unstrung.

"It's intolerable that one should be subjected to this ghastly suspense.
The boy isn't three hundred miles away."

Mr. Direck made obvious inquiries.

"Always be