loved her in her unfamiliar weakness,
crying and clinging to him.

"It's not that," she said, recovering herself with dignity. "I'm glad he
didn't give in. If he went out, and anything happened to him, I couldn't
bear to be the one who made him go."

After all, she didn't love England more than Michael.

They were silent.

"We must leave it to his own feeling," she said presently.

But Anthony's heart was hard against Michael.

"He must know that _public_ feeling's pretty strong against him. To say
nothing of _my_ feeling and _your_ feeling."

* * * * *

He did know it. He knew that they were all against him; his father and
his mother, and John and Dorothy. Because he couldn't bear to look at
Dorothy, and couldn't bear Dorothy to look at him, he kept out of her
way as much as possible.

As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he against
it.

But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of these
antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant to go.
Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael's mind had always
offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul. From his very
first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had
seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome. Collective
emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils
and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that
challenged the resistance of the private soul But in his worst dreams of
what it could do to him Michael had never imagined anything more
appalling than the collective patriotism of the British and their
Allies, this rushing together of the souls of four countries to make one
monstrous soul.

And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this moment,
was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the
awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and
from everything it cared for most. Patriotism was, no doubt, a fine
emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got you; it got you
and you were done for. He was determined that it shouldn't get him. They
couldn't see--and that was Michael's grievance--that his resistance was
his strength and not his weakness.

Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not realize
that the grown-up Michael who didn't want to enlist was the same entity
as the little Michael who hadn'