He was in solitude, and surrounded by London.  He stood still, and the vast sea of war seemed to be closing over him.  The war was growing, or the sense of its measureless scope was growing.  It had sprung, not out of this crime or that, but out of the secret invisible roots of humanity, and it was widening to the limits of evolution itself.  It transcended judgment.  It defied conclusions and rendered equally impossible both hope and despair.  His pride in his country was intensified as months passed; his faith in his country was not lessened.  And yet, wherein was the efficacy of grim words about British tenacity?  The great new Somme offensive was not succeeding in the North.  Was victory possible?  Was victory deserved?  In his daily labour he was brought into contact with too many instances of official selfishness, folly, ignorance, stupidity, and sloth, French as well as British, not to marvel at times that the conflict had not come to an ignominious end long ago through simple lack of imagination.  He knew that he himself had often failed in devotion, in rectitude, in sheer grit.

The supreme lesson of the war was its revelation of what human nature actually was.  And the solace of the lesson, the hope for triumph, lay in the fact that human nature must be substantially the same throughout the world.  If we were humanly imperfect, so at least was the enemy.

Perhaps the frame of society was about to collapse.  Perhaps Queen, deliberately courting destruction, and being destroyed, was the symbol of society.  What matter?  Perhaps civilisation, by its nobility and its elements of reason, and by the favour of destiny, would be saved from disaster after frightful danger, and Concepcion was its symbol....

All he knew was that he had a heavy day’s work before him on the morrow, and in relief from pain and insoluble problems he turned to face that work, thankful; thankful that (owing originally to Queen!) he had discovered in the war a task which suited his powers, which was genuinely useful, and which would only finish with the war; thankful for the prospect of meeting Concepcion at the week-end and exploring with her the marvellous provocative potentialities that now drew them together; thankful, too, that he had a balanced and sagacious mind, and could judge justly. (Yes, he was already forgetting his bitter condemnation of himself as a simpleton!)

How in his human self-sufficiency could he be expected to know that he had judged the negligible Christine unjustly?  Was he divine that he could see in the figure of the wanton who peered at soldiers in the street a self-convinced mystic envoy of the most clement Virgin, an envoy passionately repentant after apostasy, bound at all costs to respond to an imagined voice long unheard, and seeking—­though in vain this second time—­the protege of the Virgin so that she might once more succour and assuage his affliction?