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Stacey was smiling. He recognized with affectionate amusement a characteristic of his friend’s mind—that inability to leave any side issue of a theme unexplored before pursuing the main theme onward. How different from Stacey’s father! And also how honest and thorough! Most people thought that Philip had a wandering mind. He knew better.

For Philip always did come back to the theme. He was back in it now. “We’re against the current,” he was saying sadly. “The whole trend of the world is overwhelmingly toward collectivism, doing and feeling in common, standardization. And yet—and yet—the unit is the individual; it can’t ever be the group. The individual’s a fact. There you have him, complete, a world—his only one—to himself. The group’s a fiction, a composite photograph, lifeless. Oh, I know the whole trend of things is wrong and that we’re right—so long as we harness our individualism and don’t let it grow into a silly cult.

“Right?—wrong?” he went on musingly, staring off through the window. “What do I mean by right and wrong? Well, I mean, I suppose, creatively valuable, creatively harmful. And the war’s going to rush and swell the advance of collectivism. No more art, no more thought, no more real life! Not till long after the war is over. You’ll see.”