one I lose both. My God, I've a good mind to go home. I tell you
I'm going off my head. If I lose one I lose both. Madeline'll never live
through the loss o' the child. What shall I do, oh, what shall I do?' I
believe he used to go into his cabin, shut the door, and pester the
Almighty with his petitions. You know, they say domestic ties strengthen
a man's personality, stimulate him to ambition. I have not noticed it.
On the contrary, it has often seemed to me that married men adopt the
ethics of the jungle. Life for them is a case of the man and his mate
against the world. The jungle reverberates with their cries of rage,
jealousy, and amorous delight. What are literature and drama but the
cooerdination of these elevated cat-calls?"

"Oh, come!" murmured the Surgeon.

"Well, isn't it?" demanded Mr. Spenlove. "What made this war so popular?
Wasn't it simply because it supplied men who had been surfeited with
love, with an almost forgotten inspiration? Hadn't we been bred for a
generation on Love, beautiful Love, which laughed at locksmiths and made
the world go round? And here came Hate to have a turn! I tell you,
something _had_ to happen or we should all have gone crazy. Captain
Evans, with his exalted notions of domestic affection, was our ideal. We
were becoming monsters of marital egotism. You remember that song on the
halls:

"_What more can you want when you've got your wife and kids,
And a nice little home of your own?_

"That was rapidly becoming the sum total of England's morality. All men
were 'men without a country' and they didn't much care even if they were
citizens of a mean city, so long as their own contemptible little hutch
was secure. I rather think the war has dealt that doctrine an ugly
blow."

"Well, go on," said somebody.

"You must remember that Jack and his Madeline didn't simply look down on
the rest of the world as sordid worms who couldn't appreciate such a
holy passion. They didn't think of us at all. We didn't exist. Nothing
existed--for them--outside that microscopic domestic circle. Madeline
had been brought up to be refined, reserved, 'not like other girls.' She
silently and unconsciously laid down a narrow-gauge line along which she
and Jack were to advance through life, and Jack, who was one of those
men who are very much what their wives make them, was only too glad to
get his orders. And he, with the intuition of despair, knowing her to be
besotted with pride in their