Oliver's dud island of Huaheine. The great world would be before them.
"But give me some sort of an idea of what you propose to do," she
would with perfect propriety demand. And there Doggie was stuck. He
had not the ghost of a programme. All he had was faith in the war,
faith in the British spirit and genius that would bring it to a
perfect end, in which there would be unimagined opportunities for a
man to fling himself into a new life, and new conditions, and begin
the new work of a new civilization.

"If she'll only understand," said he, "that I can't go back to those
blasted little dogs, all will be well."

Not quite all. Although his future was as nebulous as the planetary
system in the Milky Way, at the back of his mind was a vague conviction
that it would be connected somehow with the welfare of those men whom
he had learned to know and love: the men to whom reading was little
pleasure, writing a school-child's laborious task, the glories of the
earth as interpreted through art a sealed book; the men whose daily
speech was foul metaphor; the men, hemi-demi-semi-educated, whose
crude socialistic opinions the open lessons of history and the eternal
facts of human nature derisively refuted; the men who had sweated and
slaved in factory and in field to no other purpose than to obey the
biological laws of the perpetuation of the species; yet the men with
the sweet minds of children, the gushing tenderness of women, the
hearts of lions; the men compared to whom the rotten squealing heroes
of Homer were a horde of cowardly savages. They were _men_, these
comrades of his, swift with all that there can be of divine glory in
men.

And when they came home and the high gods sounded the false trumpet of
peace?

There would be men's work in England for all the Doggies in England to
do.

Again, if Peggy could understand this, all would be well. If she
missed the point altogether, and tauntingly advised him to go and join
his friends the Socialists at once--then--he shoved his cap to the
back of his head and wrinkled his forehead--then----

"Everything will be in the soup," said he.

These reflections brought him to the Deanery. The nearest way of
entrance was the stable-yard gate, which was always open. He strode
in, waved a hand to Chipmunk who was sitting on the ground with his
back against the garage, smoking a pipe, and entered the house by the
French window of the dining-room. Where should he find Peggy? His
whol