“It will be brought home to every man, every woman, every child in the land before we are through with it.”
“You think so?” said Edith, in the curious, precise voice she had inherited from the Henningtons. “Personally I am not so sure. We are much too secure here. I sometimes think that an invasion would be the best thing that could happen to us.”
“I am inclined to agree with you,” said her father, with another shake for old Alice. “But it’s gradually coming home to the nation. Rather than give in we shall fight to the last man and the last shilling, and unless they have altered since the days of Frederick the Great they will do the same.”
“But it can’t go on indefinitely. It means extermination.”
“The end of civilization at any rate,” said the vicar mournfully. “The clock has already been put back a century.”
“Sooner or later something must surely happen.”
“But what can happen? We don’t begin to look like downing them, and it’s unthinkable that they can down us.”
“There’s God,” said Edith, in a voice of sudden, throbbing softness. “I’m convinced that He must put an end to it soon.”
Before the vicar continued the conversation he gave Alice a little touch of the whip.
“Have you ever thought, my dear girl, what an awful weight of sin there is upon the human race? Instead of expecting God to put an end to it soon, it will be little short of miraculous if He ever puts an end to it at all.”