But Anthony’s heart was hard against Michael.

“He must know that public feeling’s pretty strong against him.  To say nothing of my feeling and your feeling.”

* * * * *

He did know it.  He knew that they were all against him; his father and his mother, and John and Dorothy.  Because he couldn’t bear to look at Dorothy, and couldn’t bear Dorothy to look at him, he kept out of her way as much as possible.

As for public opinion, it had always been against him, and he against it.

But Anthony was mistaken when he thought that the pressure of these antagonisms would move Michael an inch from the way he meant to go.  Rather, it drew out that resistance which Michael’s mind had always offered to the loathsome violences of the collective soul.  From his very first encounters with the collective soul and its emotions they had seemed to Michael as dangerous as they were loathsome.  Collective emotion might be on the side of the archangels or on the side of devils and of swine; its mass was what made it dangerous, a thing that challenged the resistance of the private soul But in his worst dreams of what it could do to him Michael had never imagined anything more appalling than the collective patriotism of the British and their Allies, this rushing together of the souls of four countries to make one monstrous soul.

And neither Anthony nor Frances realized that Michael, at this moment, was afraid, not of the War so much as of the emotions of the War, the awful, terrifying flood that carried him away from his real self and from everything it cared for most.  Patriotism was, no doubt, a fine emotion; but the finer the thing was, the more it got you; it got you and you were done for.  He was determined that it shouldn’t get him.  They couldn’t see—­and that was Michael’s grievance—­that his resistance was his strength and not his weakness.

Even Frances, who believed that people never changed, did not realize that the grown-up Michael who didn’t want to enlist was the same entity as the little Michael who hadn’t wanted to go to the party, who had wanted to go on playing with himself, afraid of nothing so much as of forgetting “pieces of himself that he wanted to remember.”  He was Michael who refused to stay at school another term, and who talked about shooting himself because he had to go with his class and do what the other fellows were doing.  He objected to being suddenly required to feel patriotic because other people were feeling patriotic, to think that Germany was in the wrong because other people thought that Germany was in the wrong, to fight because other people were fighting.

Why should he?  He saw no earthly reason why.

He said to himself that it was the blasted cheek of the assumption that he resented.  There was a peculiarly British hypocrisy and unfairness and tyranny about it all.