All the while that Mr. Britling had been indulging in these imaginative slaughterings and spending the tears and hate that had gathered in his heart, his reason had been sitting apart and above the storm, like the sun waiting above thunder, like a wise nurse watching and patient above the wild passions of a child.  And all the time his reason had been maintaining silently and firmly, without shouting, without speech, that the men who had made this hour were indeed not devils, were no more devils than Mr. Britling was a devil, but sinful men of like nature with himself, hard, stupid, caught in the same web of circumstance.  “Kill them in your passion if you will,” said reason, “but understand.  This thing was done neither by devils nor fools, but by a conspiracy of foolish motives, by the weak acquiescences of the clever, by a crime that was no man’s crime but the natural necessary outcome of the ineffectiveness, the blind motives and muddleheadedness of all mankind.”

So reason maintained her thesis, like a light above the head of Mr. Britling at which he would not look, while he hewed airmen to quivering rags with a spade that he had sharpened, and stifled German princes with their own poison gas, given slowly and as painfully as possible.  “And what of the towns our ships have bombarded?” asked reason unheeded.  “What of those Tasmanians our people utterly swept away?”

“What of French machine-guns in the Atlas?” reason pressed the case.  “Of Himalayan villages burning?  Of the things we did in China?  Especially of the things we did in China....”

Mr. Britling gave no heed to that.

“The Germans in China were worse than we were,” he threw out....

He was maddened by the thought of the Zeppelin making off, high and far in the sky, a thing dwindling to nothing among the stars, and the thought of those murderers escaping him.  Time after time he stood still and shook his fist at Booetes, slowly sweeping up the sky....

And at last, sick and wretched, he sat down on a seat upon the deserted parade under the stars, close to the soughing of the invisible sea below....

His mind drifted back once more to those ancient heresies of the Gnostics and the Manichaeans which saw the God of the World as altogether evil, which sought only to escape by the utmost abstinences and evasions and perversions from the black wickedness of being.  For a while his soul sank down into the uncongenial darknesses of these creeds of despair.  “I who have loved life,” he murmured, and could have believed for a time that he wished he had never had a son....

Is the whole scheme of nature evil?  Is life in its essence cruel?  Is man stretched quivering upon the table of the eternal vivisector for no end—­and without pity?