uce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their
particular representative virtue, their quickening force, and, to put it
roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are
the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the
semicolon; though indeed a fine sense for the semicolon, like any sort
of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood, on
which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but
common. Does nobody ever notice the calculated use by French writers of
a short series of suggestive points in the current of their prose? I
confess to a certain shame for my not employing frankly that shade of
indication, a finer shade still than the dash.... But what on earth are
we talking about?" And the Chairman of the Corps Committee pulled
himself up in deprecation of our frivolity, which I recognized by
acknowledging that we might indeed hear more about the work done and
doing at the front by Richard Norton and his energetic and devoted
co-workers. Then I plunged recklessly to draw my victim.

"May not a large part of the spirit which animates these young men be a
healthy love of adventure?" I asked.

The question seemed to open up such depths that Mr. James considered a
moment and began:

"I, of course, don't personally know many of our active associates, who
naturally waste very little time in London. But, since you ask me, I
prefer to think of them as moved, first and foremost, not by the idea of
the fun or the sport they may have, or of the good thing they may make
of the job for themselves, but by that of the altogether exceptional
chance opened to them of acting blessedly and savingly for others,
though indeed if we come to that there is no such sport in the world as
so acting when anything in the nature of risk or exposure is attached.
The horrors, the miseries, the monstrosities they are in presence of are
so great surely as not to leave much of any other attitude over when
intelligent sympathy has done its best.

"Personally I feel so strongly on everything that the war has brought
into question for the Anglo-Saxon peoples that humorous detachment or
any other thinness or tepidity of mind on the subject affects me as
vulgar impiety, not to say as rank blasphemy; our whole race tension
became for me a sublimely conscious thing from the moment Germany flung
at us all her explanation of her pounce upon Belgium for massacre a