In the spring, Joan, at Mrs. Denton’s request, undertook a mission.  It was to go to Paris.  Mrs. Denton had meant to go herself, but was laid up with sciatica; and the matter, she considered, would not brook¹ of any delay.  
“It’s rather a delicate business,” she told Joan.  She was lying on a couch in her great library, and Joan was seated by her side.  “I want someone who can go into private houses and mix with educated people on their own level; and especially I want you to see one or two women: they count in France.  You know French pretty well, don’t you?”
 
“Oh, sufficiently,” Joan answered.  The one thing her mother had done for her had been to talk French with her when she was a child; and at Girton she had chummed on with a French girl, and made herself tolerably perfect.
 
“You will not go as a journalist,” continued Mrs. Denton; “but as a personal friend of mine, whose discretion² I shall vouch³ for.  I want you to find out what the people I am sending you among are thinking themselves, and what they consider ought to be done.  If we are not very careful on both sides we shall have the newspapers whipping us into war.”
 
The perpetual Egyptian trouble had cropped up again and the Carleton papers, in particular, were already sounding the tocsin.  Carleton’s argument was that we ought to fall upon France and crush her, before she could develop her supposed submarine menace.  His flaming posters were at every corner.  Every obscure French newspaper was being ransacked⁴ for “Insults and Pinpricks.”
 
“A section of the Paris Press is doing all it can to help him, of course,” explained Mrs. Denton.  “It doesn’t seem to matter to them that Germany is only waiting her opportunity, and that, if Russia comes in, it is bound to bring Austria.  Europe will pay dearly one day for the luxury of a free Press.”
 
“But you’re surely not suggesting any other kind of Press, at this period of the world’s history?” exclaimed Joan.
 
“Oh, but I am,” answered the old lady with a grim tightening⁵ of the lips.  “Not even Carleton would be allowed to incite⁶ to murder or arson⁷.  I would have him prosecuted⁸ for inciting⁹ a nation to war.”
 
“Why is the Press always so eager for war?” mused¹⁰ Joan.  “According to their own account, war doesn’t pay them.”
 
“I don’t suppose it does: not directly,” answered Mrs. Denton.  “But it helps them to establish their position and get a tighter hold upon the public.  War does pay the newspaper in the long run.  The daily newspaper lives on commotion¹¹, crime, lawlessness in general.  If people no longer enjoyed reading about violence and bloodshed half their occupation, and that the most profitable half would be gone.  It is the interest of the newspaper to keep alive the savage¹² in human nature; and war affords the readiest means of doing this.  You can’t do much to increase the number of gruesome murders and loathsome¹⁴ assaults, beyond giving all possible advertisement to them when they do occur.  But you can preach war, and cover yourself with glory, as a patriot¹⁵, at the same time.”
 
“I wonder how many of my ideals will be left to me,” sighed Joan.  “I always used to regard the Press as the modern pulpit.”
 
“The old pulpit became an evil, the moment it obtained unlimited¹⁶ power,” answered Mrs. Denton.  “It originated persecution¹⁷ and inflamed¹⁸ men’s passions against one another.  It, too, preached war for its own ends, taught superstition¹⁹, and punished thought as a crime.  The Press of to-day is stepping into the shoes of the medieval priest.  It aims at establishing the worst kind of tyranny: the tyranny over men’s minds.  They pretend to fight among themselves, but it’s rapidly becoming a close corporation.  The Institute of Journalists will soon be followed by the union of Newspaper Proprietors²⁰ and the few independent journals will be squeezed out.  Already we have German shareholders²¹ on English papers; and English capital is interested in the St. Petersburg Press.  It will one day have its International Pope and its school of cosmopolitan²² cardinals²³.”
 
Joan laughed.  “I can see Carleton rather fancying himself in a tiara,” she said.  “I must tell Phillips what you say.  He’s out for a fight with him.  Government by Parliament or Government by Press is going to be his war cry.”
 
“Good man,” said Mrs. Denton.  “I’m quite serious.  You tell him from me that the next revolution has got to be against the Press.  And it will be the stiffest fight Democracy has ever had.”
 
The old lady had tired herself.  Joan undertook the mission.  She thought she would rather enjoy it, and Mrs. Denton promised to let her have full instructions.  She would write to her friends in Paris and prepare them for Joan’s coming.
 
Joan remembered Folk, the artist she had met at Flossie’s party, who had promised to walk with her on the terrace at St. Germain, and tell her more about her mother.  She looked up his address on her return home, and wrote to him, giving him the name of the hotel in the Rue¹³ de Grenelle where Mrs. Denton had arranged that she should stay.  She found a note from him awaiting her when she arrived there.  He thought she would like to be quiet after her journey.  He would call round in the morning.  He had presumed on the privilege of age to send her some lilies.  They had been her mother’s favourite flower.  “Monsieur Folk, the great artist,” had brought them himself, and placed them in her dressing-room, so Madame informed her.
 
It was one of the half-dozen old hotels still left in Paris, and was built round a garden famous for its mighty²⁴ mulberry tree.  She breakfasted underneath²⁵ it, and was reading there when Folk appeared before her, smiling and with his hat in his hand.  He excused himself for intruding²⁶ upon her so soon, thinking from what she had written him that her first morning might be his only chance.  He evidently considered her remembrance of him a feather in his cap.
 
“We old fellows feel a little sadly, at times, how unimportant we are,” he explained.  “We are grateful when Youth throws us a smile.”
 
“You told me my coming would take you back thirty-three years,” Joan reminded him.  “It makes us about the same age.  I shall treat you as just a young man.”
 
He laughed.  “Don’t be surprised,” he said, “if I make a mistake occasionally and call you Lena.”
 
Joan had no appointment till the afternoon.  They drove out to St. Germain, and had déjeuner at a small restaurant opposite the Château; and afterwards they strolled on to the terrace.
 
“What was my mother doing in Paris?” asked Joan,
 
“She was studying for the stage,” he answered.  “Paris was the only school in those days.  I was at Julien’s studio.  We acted together for some charity.  I had always been fond of it.  An American manager who was present offered us both an engagement, and I thought it would be a change and that I could combine the two arts.”
 
“And it was here that you proposed to her,” said Joan.
 
“Just by that tree that leans forward,” he answered, pointing with his cane²⁷ a little way ahead.  “I thought that in America I’d get another chance.  I might have if your father hadn’t come along.  I wonder if he remembers me.”
 
“Did you ever see her again, after her marriage?” asked Joan.
 
“No,” he answered.  “We used to write to one another until she gave it up.  She had got into the habit of looking upon me as a harmless sort of thing to confide²⁸ in and ask advice of—which she never took.”
 
“Forgive me,” he said.  “You must remember that I am still her lover.”  They had reached the tree that leant a little forward beyond its fellows, and he had halted and turned so that he was facing her.  “Did she and your father get on together.  Was she happy?”
 
“I don’t think she was happy,” answered Joan.  “She was at first.  As a child, I can remember her singing and laughing about the house, and she liked always to have people about her.  Until her illness came.  It changed her very much.  But my father was gentleness itself, to the end.”
 
They had resumed their stroll.  It seemed to her that he looked at her once or twice a little oddly without speaking.  “What caused your mother’s illness?” he asked, abruptly²⁹.
 
The question troubled her.  It struck her with a pang³⁰ of self-reproach that she had always been indifferent to her mother’s illness, regarding it as more or less imaginary.  “It was mental rather than physical, I think,” she answered.  “I never knew what brought it about.”
 
Again he looked at her with that odd, inquisitive³¹ expression.  “She never got over it?” he asked.
 
“Oh, there were times,” answered Joan, “when she was more like her old self again.  But I don’t think she ever quite got over it.  Unless it was towards the end,” she added.  “They told me she seemed much better for a little while before she died.  I was away at Cambridge at the time.”
 
“Poor dear lady,” he said, “all those years!  And poor Jack³² Allway.”  He seemed to be talking to himself.  Suddenly he turned to her.  “How is the dear fellow?” he asked.
 
Again the question troubled her.  She had not seen her father since that week-end, nearly six months ago, when she had ran down to see him because she wanted something from him.  “He felt my mother’s death very deeply,” she answered.  “But he’s well enough in health.”
 
“Remember me to him,” he said.  “And tell him I thank him for all those years of love and gentleness.  I don’t think he will be offended.”
 
He drove her back to Paris, and she promised to come and see him in his studio and let him introduce her to his artist friends.
 
“I shall try to win you over, I warn you,” he said.  “Politics will never reform the world.  They appeal only to men’s passions and hatreds³³.  They divide us.  It is Art that is going to civilize³⁴ mankind; broaden his sympathies.  Art speaks to him the common language of his loves, his dreams, reveals to him the universal kinship.”
 
Mrs. Denton’s friends called upon her, and most of them invited her to their houses.  A few were politicians, senators or ministers.  Others were bankers, heads of business houses, literary men and women.  There were also a few quiet folk with names that were historical.  They all thought that war between France and England would be a world disaster, but were not very hopeful of averting³⁵ it.  She learnt that Carleton was in Berlin trying to secure possession of a well-known German daily that happened at the moment to be in low water.  He was working for an alliance between Germany and England.  In France, the Royalists had come to an understanding with the Clericals, and both were evidently making ready to throw in their lot with the war-mongers, hoping that out of the troubled waters the fish would come their way.  Of course everything depended on the people.  If the people only knew it!  But they didn’t.  They stood about in puzzled flocks, like sheep, wondering which way the newspaper dog was going to hound them.  They took her to the great music halls.  Every allusion³⁷ to war was greeted with rapturous applause.  The Marseillaise was demanded and encored till the orchestra rebelled from sheer exhaustion³⁸.  Joan’s patience was sorely tested.  She had to listen with impassive face to coarse jests and brutal³⁹ gibes⁴⁰ directed against England and everything English; to sit unmoved while the vast audience rocked with laughter at senseless caricatures of supposed English soldiers whose knees always gave way at the sight of a French uniform.  Even in the eyes of her courteous⁴¹ hosts, Joan’s quick glance would occasionally detect a curious glint.  The fools!  Had they never heard of Waterloo and Trafalgar?  Even if their memories might be excused for forgetting Crecy and Poictiers and the campaigns of Marlborough.  One evening—it had been a particularly trying one for Joan—there stepped upon the stage a wooden-looking man in a kilt with bagpipes⁴² under his arm.  How he had got himself into the programme Joan could not understand.  Managerial watchfulness⁴³ must have gone to sleep for once.  He played Scotch⁴⁴ melodies, and the Parisians liked them, and when he had finished they called him back.  Joan and her friends occupied a box close to the stage.  The wooden-looking Scot glanced up at her, and their eyes met.  And as the applause died down there rose the first low warning strains of the Pibroch.  Joan sat up in her chair and her lips parted.  The savage music quickened.  It shrilled⁴⁵ and skrealed.  The blood came surging through her veins⁴⁶.
 
And suddenly something lying hidden there leaped to life within her brain.  A mad desire surged hold of her to rise and shout defiance⁴⁷ at those three thousand pairs of hostile eyes confronting her.  She clutched at the arms of her chair and so kept her seat.  The pibroch ended with its wild sad notes of wailing⁴⁸, and slowly the mist cleared from her eyes, and the stage was empty.  A strange hush⁴⁹ had fallen on the house.
 
She was not aware that her hostess had been watching her.  She was a sweet-faced, white-haired lady.  She touched Joan lightly on the hand.  “That’s the trouble,” she whispered.  “It’s in our blood.”
 
Could we ever hope to eradicate⁵⁰ it?  Was not the survival of this fighting instinct proof that war was still needful to us?  In the sculpture-room of an exhibition she came upon a painted statue of Bellona.  Its grotesqueness⁵¹ shocked her at first sight, the red streaming hair, the wild eyes filled with fury, the wide open mouth—one could almost hear it screaming—the white uplifted arms with outstretched hands!  Appalling⁵²!  Terrible!  And yet, as she gazed at it, gradually the thing grew curiously⁵³ real to her.  She seemed to hear the gathering⁵⁴ of the chariots, the neighing of the horses, the hurrying of many feet, the sound of an armouring multitude, the shouting, and the braying⁵⁵ of the trumpets⁵⁶.
 
These cold, thin-lipped calculators, arguing that “War doesn’t pay”; those lank-haired cosmopolitans⁵⁷, preaching their “International,” as if the only business of mankind were wages!  War still was the stern school where men learnt virtue⁵⁸, duty, forgetfulness of self, faithfulness unto death.
 
This particular war, of course, must be stopped: if it were not already too late.  It would be a war for markets; for spheres of commercial influence; a sordid⁵⁹ war that would degrade the people.  War, the supreme⁶⁰ test of a nation’s worth, must be reserved for great ideals.  Besides, she wanted to down Carleton.
 
One of the women on her list, and the one to whom Mrs. Denton appeared to attach chief importance, a Madame de Barante, disappointed Joan.  She seemed to have so few opinions of her own.  She had buried her young husband during the Franco-Prussian war.  He had been a soldier.  And she had remained unmarried.  She was still beautiful.
 
“I do not think we women have the right to discuss war,” she confided⁶¹ to Joan in her gentle, high-bred voice.  “I suppose you think that out of date.  I should have thought so myself forty years ago.  We talk of ‘giving’ our sons and lovers, as if they were ours to give.  It makes me a little angry when I hear pampered⁶² women speak like that.  It is the men who have to suffer and die.  It is for them to decide.”
 
“But perhaps I can arrange a meeting for you with a friend,” she added, “who will be better able to help you, if he is in Paris.  I will let you know.”
 
She told Joan what she remembered herself of 1870.  She had turned her country house into a hospital and had seen a good deal of the fighting.
 
“It would not do to tell the truth, or we should have our children growing up to hate war,” she concluded.
 
She was as good as her word, and sent Joan round a message the next morning to come and see her in the afternoon.  Joan was introduced to a Monsieur de Chaumont.  He was a soldierly-looking gentleman, with a grey moustache, and a deep scar across his face.
 
“Hanged if I can see how we are going to get out of it,” he answered Joan cheerfully.&nbs............