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 man whose being puzzled him, he wanted to get at the bottom of that, too. He looked up at Somers with a searching, penetrating, inimical look, that he tried to cover with an appearance of false deference. For he was always aware of the big empty spaces of his own consciousness; like his country, a vast empty "desert" at the centre of him.

"No," he repeated. "I mean the world—economics and politics. The welfare of the world."

"It's no good asking me," said Somers. "Since the war burst my bubble of humanity I'm a pessimist, a black pessimist about the present human world."

"You think it's going to the bad?" said Jack, still drawing him with the same appearance of deference, of wanting to hear.

"Yes, I do. Faster or slower. Probably I shall never see any great change in my lifetime, but the tendency is all downhill, in my opinion. But then I'm a pessimist, so you needn't bother about my opinion."

Somers wanted to let it all go at that. But Callcott persisted.

"Do you think there'll be more wars? Do you think Germany will be in a position to fight again very soon?"

"Bah, you bolster up an old bogey out here. Germany is the bogey of yesterday, not of to-morrow."

"She frightened us out of our sleep before," said Jack, resentful.

"And now, for the time being, she's done. As a war-machine she's done, and done for ever. So much scrap-iron, her iron fist."

"You think so?" said Jack, with all the animosity of a returned hero who wants to think his old enemy the one and only bugbear, and who feels quite injured if you tell him there's no more point in his old hate.

"That's my opinion. Of course I may be wrong."

"Yes, you may," said Jack.

"Sure," said Somers. And there was silence. This time Somers smiled a little to himself.

"And what do you consider, then, is the bogey of to-morrow?" asked Jack at length, in a rather small, unwilling voice.

"I don't really know. What should you say?"