over acts of physical violence) when I read the pronouncements of such a person; for I have to my great good fortune never met him in the flesh.  If there are any saintly pacifists in Wellingsford, they keep sedulously out of my way, and they certainly do not haunt my Service Club.  And these are the only two places in which I have my being.  Even Gedge doesn’t talk of loving Germans.  He just lumps all the belligerents together in one conglomerate hatred, for upsetting his comfortable social scheme.

As I say, I lack the universal sympathy of the saint.  I can’t like people I don’t like.  Some people I love very deeply; others, being of a kindly disposition, I tolerate; others again I simply detest.  Now Wellingsford, like every little country town in England, is drab with elderly gentlewomen.  As I am a funny old tabby myself, I have to mix with them.  If I refuse invitations to take tea with them, they invite themselves to tea with me.  “The poor Major,” they say, “is so lonely.”  And they bait their little hooks and angle for gossip of which I am supposed—­Heaven knows why—­to be a sort of stocked pond.  They don’t carry home much of a catch, I assure you....  Well, of some of them I am quite fond.  Mrs. Boyce, for all her shortcomings, is an old crony for whom I entertain a sincere affection.  Towards Betty’s aunt, Miss Fairfax, a harmless lady with a passion for ecclesiastical embroidery, I maintain an attitude of benevolent neutrality.  But Mrs. Holmes, Randall’s mother, and her sisters, the daughters of an eminent publicist who seems to have reared his eminence on bones of talk flung at him by Carlisle, George Eliot, Lewes, Monckton Milnes, and is now, doubtless, recording their toe-prints on the banks of Acheron, I never could and never can abide.  My angel of a wife saw good in them, and she loved the tiny Randall, of whom I too was fond; so, for her sake, I always treated them with courtesy and kindness.  Also for Randall’s father’s sake.  He was a bluff, honest, stock-broking Briton who fancied pigeons and bred greyhounds for coursing, and cared less for literature and art than does the equally honest Mrs. Marigold in my kitchen.  But his wife and her sisters led what they called the intellectual life.  They regarded it as a heritage from their pompous ass of a father.  Of course they were not eighteen-sixty, or even eighteen-eighty.  They prided themselves on developing the hereditary tradition of culture to its extreme modern expression.  They were of the semi-intellectual type of idiot—­and, if it destroys it, the great war will have some justification—­which professes to find in the dull analysis of the drab adultery and suicide of a German or Scandinavian rabbit-picker a supreme expression of human existence.  All their talk was of Hauptmann and Sudermann (they dropped them patriotically, I must say, as outrageous fellows, on the outbreak of war), Strindberg, Dostoievsky—­though I found they had never read either “Crime and