n print that they have had "afternoon-tea" with ladies
of any title.

"Deep in the heart of every woman is respect for the title or the
decorative side of human life. A flower to her is something more than a
thing.

"You women will tell you you do not know them--and how could you?--you,
a man who lived the greater part of your life in a monastery apart from
your fellows, apart from the problems, apart from the battle against
conditions that make men--men. You, in the seclusion of your own kind,
conceived dreams of Utopian madness and you came forth and cast your
foolish fancies like a net upon the ignorant. And now you find your
failings; you see the petty smallness of your ideals and you
retreat--back into your abbey like a frightened crab creeping beneath
the cover of a stone."

"I know it now," said the crestfallen man. "We can only learn our
lessons through bitter experience."

He turned upon his heel as if to leave.

She was touched by the pathetic figure and held out her hand to him.

He took it in his and bent over it.

"Good-bye," he said. "I go home on this day of days, this day of 'peace
on earth and good will to men'--and alas! the world a seething mass of
discontent!"

I brought him to the house and gave him some wine to drink.

"Good-bye," he said. "God bless you." And he waved his hat as we watched
the careworn figure slowly stroll down the track and pass out of our
lives.

CHAPTER XXXI.

The Wonderful Month of War.

Then the great war crashed upon Europe, and it did not come from Asia!

Its sudden outbreak proved many things; first, that invention had not
been entirely exterminated; and second, that artificial laws could not
destroy the divine in humanity.

Above all, the war proved that brawn could not suppress the aspiring
flights of the brain; for during the socialistic era of "human
equality," men with more highly developed inventive faculties, men who
wished to cultivate the spirit that inspires the human to ever excel,
met in mysterious places and plotted!

They felt the time must eventually arrive when the unnatural social
position the Humanists adopted must overbalance itself; hence they
prepared for the impending cataclysm.

It is strange, in the history of the world, how a thread of sympathy
mysteriously binds together those whose souls are suffering from a
common tyranny.

Throughout Europe bands of scientific militants of both sexes met in
secret conclave and pl