"But a greater England may arise from that failure."
"Yes, but it won't be our England. The grave of our England was dug by the Victorians; this generation has planted the flowers upon it; the monument will be raised by the new generation. Oh yes, I know, it's an egotistical regret, a superficial and sentimental regret, if you will, but you must allow some of us to cherish it; otherwise we could not go on. And in the end I believe history will indorse the school of thought I follow. In the end I'm convinced that it will blame the men who failed to see that England was great by the measure of her greatness, and that the real way to win this war was by what were sneeringly called side-shows. All our history has been the alternate failure and triumph of our side-shows; we made ourselves what we are by side-shows."
Hazlewood swept from the table the pile of crumbs he had been building while he was talking, and smiled at Sylvia.
"It's your turn now," he said.
"You've deprived me of any capacity for generalization. I think perhaps you may have got things out of focus. I know it's a platitude, but isn't one always inevitably out of focus nowadays? When I was still at a distance from the war the whole perspective was blurred to my vision by the intrusion of individual humiliations and sufferings. Now I'm nearer to it I feel that my vision is equally faulty from an indifference to them," Sylvia said, earnestly.
Then she told Hazlewood the story of Queenie and the passport, and asked for his opinion.
"Well, of course, there's an instance to hand of sterile professionalism. Naturally, had I been the official in Bucharest, I should have given the girl her passport. At such a moment I should have been too much moved by her desire of England to have done otherwise. Moreover, if her desire of England was not mere lust, I should have been right to do so."
Sylvia finished her story by telling him of Queenie's escape with the juggler after the probable theft of Maud's passport.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "I'll bet they've gone to Salonika. We'll send a telegram to our people there and warn them to keep a lookout."
"What a paradox human sympathy is," Sylvia murmured. "Ever since I got to Nish it's been on my conscience that I didn't tell you about this girl before, and yet in Bucharest the notion of doing anything like that was positively disgusting to my sense of decency. And look at you! A moment ago you were abusing the official in Bucharest for his red tape, and now your eyes are flashing with the prospect of hunting her down."