“We’re within range of our guns,” said our witch, looking down.  “This cloud must be sinking.”

“It will never sink enough to save you,” said the German, trying to conceal the nervousness with which she rearranged her rigid-looking cloak round her.  She seemed to be sinking herself to a certain extent; perhaps the warmth of her emotions was melting the cloud beneath her.  Certainly she now sat, apparently squat as an idol, her figure submerged in cloud to the waist.

The English witch looked down, singing a little to keep up her morale.  London looked exactly like the maps you buy for sixpence from sad-looking gentlemen in the Strand, only it was sown with a thin crop of lights, and was chiefly designed in grey and darker grey, and the Tubes did not show so indecently.  With surprising clearness the rhythmic whispering of the trains and the scanty traffic could be heard, and once even the shrill characteristic voice of an ambulance.  Somehow space did not seem disturbed by these sounds; its quietness pressed upon the listeners’ minds like a heavy dream, and there was no real believing in anything but space.  Our witch felt she could have smudged London off the face of space with her finger, and the thought of seven million lives involved in the fate of that sliding chart carried no conviction to her.  She forced into her mind the realisation of humanity, and of little lives lived in little rooms.

“As one Crusader to another,” she said, “do you find it does much good in the war against Evil to drop bombs on people in their homes?  After all, every baby is good in bed, and even soldiers when on leave are anti-militarist.”

“It always does good to exterminate vermin in their lair,” said the German, trying restlessly to raise herself more to the level of her lighter companion, who was still perched on the surface of the cloud.  “It is at home that Evil is originated, it is at home that English women conceive and bear a new generation of enemies of the Right, it is at home that English children are bred up in their marauding ways.  It is on the home, the vital place of Evil, that the scourge should fall.”

“Oh, but surely not,” said our witch eagerly.  “It is at home that people are kindly and think what they will have for supper, and bathe their babies.  Men come home when they are hurt or hungry, and women when they are lonely or tired.  Nobody is taught anything stupid or international at home.  You can bring death to a home, but never a righteous scourge.  Nobody feels scourged or instructed by a bomb in their parlour, they just feel dead, and dead without a reason.”

The cloud was very small now.  The filmy edges of it were faintly rising and falling like the seaweed frill of a rock in the sea.  The witch kept her eyes on her opponent’s face, because to look anywhere else gave her a white feeling in her head.

“Crusades of the high explosive kind,” she said, “can work only on battle-fields.  Indeed, even on battle-fields—­ah, what are we about, what are we about?  We are neither of us killing Evil, we are killing youth....”