Page:The council of seven.djvu/335

 *sues their minds marched together. Their outlook on life was the same.

"This horrible coil," said George Hierons at last, "began first to be woven when America declined to enter the League of Nations. Her arguments, at the time, were no doubt strong, but she was not able to see far enough."

Helen sighed. "To me," she said, "the inability to see far enough begins to seem the universal tragedy, common to each individual life and to the life of every nation."

Hierons agreed. And he added with an air whimsically prophetic: "Man being as he is in the world that we know, it is a tragedy for which there can be no remedy. Even the wisest people have to improvise their actions from day to day, without knowing or being able to guess what their re-percussion will be."

Slowly they walked along Knightsbridge, past Hyde Park Corner into Piccadilly. As they approached the Ritz, which was on the other side of the road, the eyes of both were most oddly caught by a sight that held them fascinated.

They had grown alive to the fact that Saul Hartz was stepping off the pavement immediately in front of them. In spite, almost in defiance, of a flux of traffic, the Colossus made a bee line for the opposite side of the street. With a glossy silk hat tilted at a rather rakish angle, the fur coat of the plutocrat and an umbrella with an ivory crook depending from