weak.

"I suppose there's a lot in all that, sir," said Alec Naylor, "but I
don't think the effect on one's character is always what you say. I think
I've come out of this awful business a good deal softer than I went in."
He laughed in an apologetic way. "More, more sentimental, if you like,
with more feeling, don't you know, for human life, and suffering, and so
on. I've seen a great many men killed, but the sight hasn't made me any
more ready to kill men. In fact, quite the reverse." He smiled again.
"Really sometimes, for a row of pins, I'd have turned conscientious
objector."

Mrs. Naylor looked apprehensively at the General: would he explode? No,
he took it quite quietly. "You're a man who can afford to say it, Alec,"
he remarked, with a nod that was almost approving.

Naylor looked affectionately at his son and turned to Beaumaroy. "And
what's the war done to you?" he asked. And this question did draw from
the General, if not an explosion, at least a rather contemptuous smile:
Beaumaroy had earned no right to express opinions!

But express one he did, and with his habitual air of candor. "I believe
it's destroyed every, scruple I ever had!"

"Mr. Beaumaroy!" exclaimed his hostess, scandalized; while the two
girls, Cynthia and Gertie, laughed.

"I mean it. Can you see human life treated as dirt, absolutely as cheap
as dirt, for three years, and come out thinking it worth anything? Can
you fight for your own hand, right or wrong? Oh, yes, right or wrong, in
the end, and it's no good blinking it. Can you do that for three years in
war, and then hesitate to fight for your own hand, right or wrong, in
peace? Who really cares for right or wrong, anyhow?"

A pause ensued--rather an uncomfortable pause. There was a raw sincerity
in Beaumaroy's utterance that made it a challenge.

"I honestly think we did care about the rights and wrongs--we in
England," said Naylor.

"That was certainly so at the beginning," Irechester agreed.

Beaumaroy took him up smartly. "Aye, at the beginning. But what about
when our blood got up? What then? Would we, in our hearts, rather have
been right and got a licking, or wrong and given one?"

"A searching question!" mused old Naylor. "What say you, Tom Punnit?"

"It never occurred to me to put the question," the General answered
brusquely.

"May I ask why not, sir?" said Beaumaroy respectfully.

"Because I believed in God. I knew that we were right, and I knew that we
should