He cut the cigar carefully with a club tool, and pushed the match-stand across the table with a brusque gesture.  George would not thank him for the cigar.

“You’re on that Indian barracks, aren’t you?”

“Yes.  They’re in a Hades of a hurry.”

“Well, my factory is in much more of a hurry.”

George was startled.  He had heard nothing of the factory for a month, and had assumed that the war had scotched the enterprise.

He said: 

“Then the war won’t stop you?”

Sir Isaac shook his head slowly, with an arrogant smile.  It then occurred to George that this man differed strangely from all other men—­because the sinister spell of the war had been powerless over him alone.  All other men bore the war in their faces and in their gestures, but this man did not.

“I’m going to make munitions now—­explosives.  I’m going to have the biggest explosives factory in the world.  However, the modifications in the general plan won’t be serious.  I want to talk to you about that.”

“Have you got contracts, then, already?”

“No.  Both the War Office and the Admiralty have told me they have all the explosives they want,” he sneered.  “But I’ve made a few inquiries, and I think that by the time my factory’s up they’ll be wanting more explosives than they can get.  In fact I wish I could build half a dozen factories.  Dare say I shall.”

“Then you think we’re in for a long war?”

“Not specially that.  If it’s a long war you English will win.  If it’s a short war the Germans will win, and it will be the end of France as a great power.  That’s all.”

“Won’t it be the end of your factory too?”

“Noh!” exclaimed Sir Isaac, with careless compassion in his deep, viscid voice.  “If it’s a short war, there’ll be another war.  You English will never leave it alone.  So that whatever happens, if I take up explosives, I can’t go wrong.  It’s velvet.”

“It seems to me we shall bust up the whole world if we aren’t careful, soon.”

Sir Isaac smiled more compassion.

“Not at all,” he said easily.  “Not at all.  Things are always arranged in the end—­more or less satisfactorily, of course.  It’s up to the individual to look out for himself.”

George said: 

“I was thinking of going into the Army.”

The statement was not strictly untrue, but he had never formulated it, and he had never thought consecutively of such a project, which did indeed appear too wild and unpractical for serious consideration.

“This recruiting’s been upsetting you.”

George’s vague patriotism seemed to curdle at these half-dozen scornful words.

“Do you think I oughtn’t to go into the Army, Sir Isaac?”