tting here tonight a wooden
thing amongst living people. He felt that a man might have been
made of him, but nobody had taken the trouble to do it;
tongue-tied, foot-tied, hand-tied. If one were born into this
world like a bear cub or a bull calf, one could only paw and
upset things, break and destroy, all one's life.

Gerhardt wrapped the violin up in its cloth. The little boy
thanked him and carried it away. Madame Fleury and her daughter
wished their guests goodnight.

David said he was warm, and suggested going into the garden to
smoke before they went to bed. He opened one of the long windows
and they stepped out on the terrace. Dry leaves were rustling
down on the walks; the yew trees made a solid wall, blacker than
the darkness. The fountain must have caught the starlight; it was
the only shining thing,--a little clear column of twinkling
silver. The boys strolled in silence to the end of the walk.

"I guess you'll go back to your profession, all right," Claude
remarked, in the unnatural tone in which people sometimes speak
of things they know nothing about.

"Not I. Of course, I had to play for them. Music has always been
like a religion in this house. Listen," he put up his hand; far
away the regular pulsation of the big guns sounded through the
still night. "That's all that matters now. It has killed
everything else."

"I don't believe it." Claude stopped for a moment by the edge of
the fountain, trying to collect his thoughts. "I don't believe it
has killed anything. It has only scattered things." He glanced
about hurriedly at the sleeping house, the sleeping garden, the
clear, starry sky not very far overhead. "It's men like you that
get the worst of it," he broke out. "But as for me, I never knew
there was anything worth living for, till this war came on.
Before that, the world seemed like a business proposition."

"You'll admit it's a costly way of providing adventure for the
young," said David drily.

"Maybe so; all the same..."

Claude pursued the argument to himself long after they were in
their luxurious beds and David was asleep. No battlefield or
shattered country he had seen was as ugly as this world would be
if men like his brother Bayliss controlled it altogether. Until
the war broke out, he had supposed they did control it; his
boyhood had been clouded and enervated by that belief. The
Prussians had believed it, too, apparently. But the event had
shown that there were a great many pe