ysterical
war democracy which declares that all men are equal until they're
wounded; then they're superior; or until they're dead; then they're
forgotten."

George grunted.

"You're right, Driggs. It won't survive the war."

"Paper work!" Wandel sneered.

"It ought to last!" Lambert cried. "I hope it does."

"Pray that it doesn't," Wandel said. "I fancy the real hell of war comes
after the war is over. We'll find that out, if we live. As for me, even
now when we're all beloved brothers, I'd give a good deal to be sitting
in a Fifth Avenue club looking out on lesser men."

"I would, too," George said, fervently.

Lambert spoke with abysmal seriousness.

"I'd rather have some of the splendid lesser men sitting on the same
side of the window with me."

George stared at him. What had happened to this aristocrat who had once
made a medieval gesture with a horse whip? Certainly he, the plebeian
victim of that attack, had no such wish. Put these men on the same side
of a club window, or a factory window, for that matter, and they'd drag
the whole business down to their level, to eternal smash fast enough.
Why, hang Lambert! It amounted to visualizing his sister as a slattern.
He smiled with a curious pride. Reddest revolution couldn't make her
that. She wouldn't come down off her high horse if a dozen bayonets
were at her throat. What the deuce was he thinking about? Why should he
be proud of that? For, if he lived, he was going to drag her off
himself, but he wouldn't make her a slattern.

"You talk like Allen," he said, "and you haven't even his excuse."

"I've seen the primeval for the first time," Lambert answered.

"I'll admit it has qualities," Wandel yawned. "Anyway, I'm off."

Mrs. Planter came back to George's mind, momentarily as primeval as a
man surrendered to the battle lust. What one saw, except in
self-destructive emergencies, he told himself, was all veneer. Ages,
epochs, generations, merely determined its depth. The hell after war!
Did Wandel mean there was danger then of an attempt to thin the veneer?
Was Lambert, of all people, going to assist the Allens to plane it away?

"It would mean another dark ages," he mused.

His own little self-imposed coat he saw now had gone on top of a far
thicker one without which he would have been as helpless as a bushman or
some anthropoidal creature escaped from an unexplored country.

He laughed, but uncomfortably. Those two had made him uneasy, and
Squ