It was that same colonel who, earlier in the evening, had thus ended a discussion on the unemployed.  “The poor ye have always with you,” said the Colonel, delicately smacking his lips over his champagne and gently turning the conversation to the safer topic of high explosives.

He turned impatiently from thought of it to the men and women far down below.  He was always looking now at crowds of men and women, always hoping for a familiar figure in those crowds.

With all the baffling unreality there had been around her, she seemed to express reality.  She made him want it.  She made him want life.  Made him feel what he was missing—­realize what he had never had.

It seemed that if he did not find her he would not find life.

She, too, had wanted life.  Her quest had been for life—­that he knew.  And he wanted to find her that he might tell her he understood, tell her—­what he had never told any one—­that all his life he, too, had dreamed of a something somewhere.

And he was growing the farther apart from his army friends because he had come to think of them as standing between.

During the summer he had seen.  In the mornings when they were going to work, in the evenings when they were going home, he had many times been upon the streets with the people who worked.  He could not any longer regard the enlargement of the army, its organization and problems as the most vital thing in the world.  It did not seem to him that what the world wanted was a more deadly rifle.  His lip curled a little as he looked down at the men and women below and considered how little difference it made to them whether rifles were improved or not.  And so many things did make difference with them—­they needed improvements on so many things—­that to be giving one’s life to perfecting instruments of destruction struck him as a sorry vocation.

It made him feel very distinctly apart.

He knew of no class of men more isolated from the real war of the world than were the men of the army.  They were tied up in their own war of competition—­competition in preparedness for war.  They were frantically occupied in the creation of a Frankenstein.  They would so perfect destruction as to destroy themselves.  Meanwhile their blood had grown so hot in their war of competition that they were in prime condition for persuading themselves a real war awaited them.  This hot blood found its way into much talk of hardihood and strenuousness, vigor, martial virtues, “the steeps of life,” “the romance of history”—­all calculated to raise the temperature of tax-paying blood.  So successful was the self-delusion of the militarist that sanity appeared mollycoddelism.

Their greatest fear was fear of the loss of fear.

And now they were threatened by colorless economists who were mollycoddelistically making clear that the “stern reality” was the giant hallucination.

It seemed rather close to farce.