ss. To this rule there is no exception."
Lechford House had been "taken over" in its entirety by a Government
department that believed in the virtue of mystery and of long hours.
He looked up at the higher windows. He could not distinguish the
chimney amid the newly-revealed stars. He thought of Queen, the white
woman. Evidently he had never understood Queen, for if Concepcion
admired her she was worth admiration. Concepcion never made a mistake
in assessing fundamental character.

The complete silent absorption of Lechford House into the war-machine
rather dismayed him. He had seen not a word as to the affair in the
newspapers--and Lechford House was one of the final strongholds of
privilege! He strolled on into the quietness of the Park--of which
one of the gate-keepers said to him that it would be shutting in a few
minutes.

He was in solitude, and surrounded by London. He stood still, and the
vast sea of war seemed to be closing over him. The war was growing, or
the sense of its measureless scope was growing. It had sprung, not
out of this crime or that, but out of the secret invisible roots of
humanity, and it was widening to the limits of evolution itself.
It transcended judgment. It defied conclusions and rendered equally
impossible both hope and despair. His pride in his country was
intensified as months passed; his faith in his country was not
lessened. And yet, wherein was the efficacy of grim words about
British tenacity? The great new Somme offensive was not succeeding in
the North. Was victory possible? Was victory deserved? In his daily
labour he was brought into contact with too many instances of official
selfishness, folly, ignorance, stupidity, and sloth, French as well as
British, not to marvel at times that the conflict had not come to an
ignominious end long ago through simple lack of imagination. He knew
that he himself had often failed in devotion, in rectitude, in sheer
grit.

The supreme lesson of the war was its revelation of what human nature
actually was. And the solace of the lesson, the hope for triumph,
lay in the fact that human nature must be substantially the same
throughout the world. If we were humanly imperfect, so at least was
the enemy.

Perhaps the frame of society was about to collapse. Perhaps Queen,
deliberately courting destruction, and being destroyed, was the symbol
of society. What matter? Perhaps civilisation, by its nobility and its
elements of reason, and by the fav