Presently Roger came out from his den with the evening paper in his hand
and sat down close beside her. He did this conscientiously almost every
evening. With a sigh he opened his paper to read, again there was silence
in the room, and in this silence Roger's mind roamed far away across the
sea.
For the front page of his paper was filled with the usual headlines,
tidings which a year before would have made a man's heart jump into his
throat, but which were getting commonplace now. Dead and wounded by the
thousands, famine, bombs and shrapnel, hideous atrocities, submarines and
floating mines, words once remote but now familiar, always there on the
front page and penetrating into his soul, becoming a part of Roger Gale, so
that never again when the war was done would he be the same man he was
before. For he had forever lost his faith in the sanity and steadiness of
the great mind of humanity. Roger had thought of mankind as mature, but
there had come to him of late the same feeling he had had before in the
bosom of his family. Mankind had suddenly unmasked and shown itself for
what it was--still only a precocious child, with a terrible precocity. For
its growth had been one sided. Its strength was growing at a speed
breathless and astounding. But its vision and its poise, its sense of human
justice, of kindliness and tolerance and of generous brotherly love, these
had been neglected and were being left behind.
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