I could well understand her feeling.  I had experienced it often.  Nothing has ever filled me with a more hopeless sense of inadequacy and utter uselessness than to watch, as I am often compelled to watch, the deplorable results of the determined choice made by certain human beings to go backward and downward rather than forward and upward,—­a choice in which no outside advice can be of any avail because they will not take it even if it is offered.  It is a life-and-death matter for their own wills to determine,—­and no power, human or divine, can alter the course they elect to adopt.  As well expect that God would revert His law of gravitation to save the silly suicide who leaps to destruction from tower or steeple, as that He would change the eternal working of His higher Spiritual Law to rescue the resolved Soul which, knowing the difference between good and evil, deliberately prefers evil.  If an angel of light, a veritable ‘Son of the Morning’ rebels, he must fall from Heaven.  There is no alternative; until of his own free-will he chooses to rise again.

My friend and I had often talked together on these knotty points which tangled up what should be the straightness of many a life’s career, and as we mutually knew each other’s opinions we did not discuss them at the moment.

Time passed quickly,—­the train rushed farther and farther north, and by six o’clock on that warm, sunshiny afternoon we were in the grimy city of Glasgow, from whence we went on to a still grimier quarter, Greenock, where we put up for the night.  The ‘best’ hotel was a sorry affair, but we were too tired to mind either a bad dinner or uncomfortable rooms, and went to bed glad of any place wherein to sleep.  Next morning we woke up very early, refreshed and joyous, in time to see the sun rise in a warm mist of gold over a huge man-o’-war outside Greenock harbour,—­a sight which, in its way, was very fine and rather suggestive of a Turner picture.

“Dear old Sol!” said Francesca, shading her eyes as she looked at the dazzle of glory—­“His mission is to sustain life,—­and the object of that war-vessel bathed in all his golden rays is to destroy it.  What unscrupulous villains men are!  Why cannot nations resolve on peace and amity, and if differences arise agree to settle them by arbitration?  It’s such a pagan and brutal thing to kill thousands of innocent men just because Governments quarrel.”

“I entirely agree with you,”—­I said—­“All the same I don’t approve of Governments that preach peace while they drain the people’s pockets for the purpose of increasing armaments, after the German fashion.  Let us be ready with adequate defences,—­but it’s surely very foolish to cripple our nation at home by way of preparation for wars which may never happen.”