“I see only that men will fight and that war will come again.  Out there I learned the nature of men.”

“If there’s divinity in you there’s divinity in every man.  That will oppose war—­end it eventually.  Men are not taught right.  Education and religion will bring peace on earth, good-will to man.”

“No, they will not.  They never have done so.  We have educated men and religious men.  Yet war comes despite them.  The truth is that life is a fight.  Civilization is only skin-deep.  Underneath man is still a savage.  He is a savage still because he wants the same he had to have when he lived in primitive state.  War isn’t necessary to show how every man fights for food, clothing, shelter.  To-day it’s called competition in business.  Look at your father.  He has fought and beaten men like Neuman.  Look at the wheat farmers in my country.  Look at the I.W.W.  They all fight.  Look at the children.  They fight even at their games.  Their play is a make-believe battle or escaping or funeral or capture.  It must be then that some kind of strife was implanted in the first humans and that it is necessary to life.”

“Survival of the fittest!” exclaimed Lenore, in earnest bitterness.  “Kurt, we have changed.  You are facing realities and I am facing the infinite.  You represent the physical, and I the spiritual.  We must grow into harmony with each other.  We can’t ever hope to learn the unattainable truth of life.  There is something beyond us—­something infinite which I believe is God.  My soul finds it in you....  The first effects of the war upon you have been trouble, sacrifice, pain, and horror.  You have come out of it impaired physically and with mind still clouded.  These will pass, and therefore I beg of you don’t grow fixed in absolute acceptance of the facts of evolution and materialism.  They cannot be denied, I grant.  I see that they are realities.  But also I see beyond them.  There is some great purpose running through the ages.  In our day the Germans have risen, and in the eyes of most of the world their brutal force tends to halt civilization and kill idealism.  But that’s only apparent—­only temporary.  We shall come out of this dark time better, finer, wiser.  The history of the world is a proof of a slow growth and perfection.  It will never be attained.  But is not the growth a beautiful and divine thing?  Does it now oppose a hopeless prospect?...  Life is inscrutable.  When I think—­only think without faith—­all seems so futile.  The poet says we are here as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night....  Trust me, my husband!  There is something in woman—­the instinct of creation—­the mother—­that feels what cannot be expressed.  It is the hope of the world.”

“The mother!” burst out Dorn.  “I think of that—­in you....  Suppose I have a son, and war comes in his day.  Suppose he is killed, as I killed that poor boy!...  How, then, could I reconcile that with this, this something you feel so beautifully?  This strange sense of God!  This faith in a great purpose of the ages!”