n the
gracious touch of a more courtly past, smiled thoughtfully while his
younger companion, who had known the life of court and camp, in the
elder hemisphere, puffed at his blackened pipe: "Adult or adolescent, we
are altering fast, casting aside today the garments of yesterday,"
admitted Prince. "In my own youth a gentleman felt the call of honour to
meet his personal enemy on the duelling field. I have, myself, answered
that call. In my young manhood I donned the gray, with a crusader's
ardent sincerity, to fight for the institution of human slavery. Today
we think in different terms."

Upon them both had fallen a mood; the mood of gazing far backward and
perhaps also of adventuring as far forward in the forecasting of human
transition.

Such a spirit may come to men who have, in effect, stepped aside from
the march of their own day, into an elder regime--a pioneer setting.

To Basil Prince, in the fore-shortening of retrospect, all the gradual
amendments of life, as he had known them in their enactment, stood forth
at once in a gigantic composition of contrasts; heroically pictured on a
single canvas.

"Now," he reflected, "we hear the younger generation speak with a
pitying indulgence of the archaic stodginess of mid-Victorian
ideas--and, my God, sir, that was all only yesterday, and this
mid-Victorian thought was revolutionary in its newness and its
advancement! I can remember when it startled the world: when Tennyson
was accounted a wild radical, and Darwin a voice savouring strongly of
heresy."

McCalloway filled a fresh pipe. He sent out a cloud of tobacco smoke and
set back his shoulders.

"In my belief, your radical poet said one true thing at least," he
observed.

"... I doubt not through the ages, one increasing purpose runs.

"That purpose lies towards the swallowing of the local, and the
individualistic, the national even into the international. It lies
toward the broadest federation of ideals that can exist in harmony." He
paused there, and in the voice of one expecting contradiction, added:
"And that end will not be attained in parliaments, but on the
battlefield."

"The creed of Americanism," Prince reminded him, "rests on the pillars
of non-interference with other states and of a minimum of meddling among
our own."

"So far, yes," admitted the Scot, but his eyes held a stubborn light of
argument. "Yet I predict that when the whole story of Americanism is
written, it will be cast to