“Ah, my dear,” she said, “I am glad you have come. I have got the horrors. You saw the latest news? Yes? And have you heard again from Hermann? No, I have not had a word.”
He kissed her and sat down.
“No, I have not heard either,” he said. “I expect he is right. Letters have been stopped.”
“And what do you think will be the result of Belgium’s appeal?” she asked.
“Who can tell? The Prime Minister is going to make a statement on Monday. There have been Cabinet meetings going on all day.”
She looked at him in silence.
“And what do you think?” she asked.
Quite suddenly, at her question, Michael found himself facing it, even as, when the final catastrophe was more remote, he had faced it with Falbe. All this week he knew he had been looking away from it, telling himself that it was incredible. Now he discovered that the one thing he dreaded more than that England should go to war, was that she should not. The consciousness of national honour, the thing which, with religion, Englishmen are most shy of speaking about, suddenly asserted itself, and he found on the moment that it was bigger than anything else in the world.
“I think we shall go to war,” he said. “I don’t see personally how we can exist any more as a nation if we don’t. We—we shall be damned if we don’t, damned for ever and ever. It’s moral extinction not to.”
She kindled at that.