They gravely went and did so. "Poor old British Lion!—Listen!"
News was being cried. "Details of fight at Bushman's Kop!"
Christopher Josslyn left the lions, ran across and got a paper, then returned. "A small affair!" he said. "How interminably the thing drags out!"
"But they'll have peace directly now."
"Yes—but it's Poor old Lion, just the same—"
They moved from the four in stone, striking across to Pall Mall. "There was a halcyon time in England, fifty years or so ago, when, if you'll believe what men wrote, it was seriously held that no civilized man would ever again encroach upon a weaker brother's rights! Æons were at hand of universal education, stained glass, and ascension lilies. At any rate æons of brotherhood. Under the kindly control of the great Elder Brother England. And they had some reason—it looked for an illusory moment that way. I always try to remember that—and moments like that in every land's history—at moments such as these. Why doesn't that moment carry on over? There's something deeply, fundamentally wrong."
He looked along the crowded street. Men were buying papers—that seemed their chief employment. Delarey—Kitchener—Report of fight at Hartz River.
"Not far from a billion dollars expended on this war—and those East Side streets we went through yesterday—Concentration Camps—and the Coronation—this reactionary Administration with its Corn Laws and Coercion Laws and wretched Education Bill, and so on—and the Coronation talk—and Piccadilly last night after nine—"
"Oh," said Molly sharply. "That's the sting that I feel! It's women and children who are suffering in those Concentration Camps, I suppose—and it's women's sons who are lying on the battlefields—and it's women just as well as men who are paying the taxes—and it's women, too, in those horrible slums, wretched and hopeless—and bad legislation falls on women just as hardly as on men—but the other! There we've got the tragedy mostly to ourselves—and there's no greater tragedy below the stars!" She dashed a bright drop from her eyes. "I'll never forget that girl, last night, on the Embankment—thin and painted and that hollow laugh.... I wish women would wake up!"
"Women and men," said the other. "They're waking, but it's slow, it's slow, it's slow."