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薇安90天个人品牌创业营 第三期dtui

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小编❥(^_-)：gtwj67  card659

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See,” he said, with a curve of the finger which included most of the Map of Europe. “Here are countries engaged—like the Bandarlog—in their own affairs. Quarrelling, snatching things from each other, blustering or amusing themselves with transitory pomps and displays of power. Here is a huge empire whose immense, half-savage population has seethed for centuries in its hidden, boiling cauldron of rebellion. Oh! it has seethed! And only cruelties have repressed it. Now and then it has boiled over in assassination in high places, and one has wondered how long its autocratic splendour could hold its own. Here are small, fierce, helpless nations overrun and outraged into a chronic state of secret ever-ready hatred. Here are innocent, small countries, defenceless through their position and size. Here is France rich, careless, super-modern and cynic. Here is England comfortable to stolidity, prosperous and secure to dullness in her own half belief in a world civilization, which no longer argues in terms of blood and steel. And here—in a well-entrenched position in the midst of it all—within but a few hundreds of miles of weakness, complicity, disastrous unreadiness and panic-stricken uncertainty of purpose, sits this Man of One Dream—who believes God Himself his vassal. Here he sits.”

“Yes his One Dream. He has had no other.” The Duchess was poring over the map also. They were as people pondering over a strange and terrible game.

“It is his monomania. It possessed him when he was a boy. What Napoleon hoped to accomplish he has BELIEVED he could attain by concentrating all the power of people upon preparation for it—and by not flinching from pouring forth their blood as if it were the refuse water of his gutters.”

“Yes—the blood—the blood!” the Duchess shuddered. “He would pour it forth without a qualm.”

Coombe touched the map first at one point and then at another.

“See!” he said again, and this time savagely. “This empire flattered and entangled by cunning, this country irritated, this deceived, this drawn into argument, this and this and this treated with professed friendship, these tricked and juggled with—And then, when his plans are ripe and he is made drunk with belief in himself—just one sodden insult or monstrous breach of faith, which all humanity must leap to resent—And there is our World Revolution.”

The Duchess sat upright in her chair.

“Why did you let your youth pass?” she said. “If you had begun early enough, you could hare made the country listen to you. Why did you do it?”

“For the same reason that all selfish grief and pleasure and indifference let the world go by. And I am not sure they would have listened. I speak freely enough now in some quarters. They listen, but they do nothing. There is a warning in the fact that, as he has seen his youth leave him without giving him his opportunity, he has been a disappointed man inflamed and made desperate. At the outset, he felt that he must provide the world with some fiction of excuse. As his obsession and arrogance have swollen, he sees himself and his ambition as reason enough. No excuse is needed. Deutschland uber alles—is sufficient.”

He pushed the map away and his fire died down. He spoke almost in his usual manner.

“The conquest of the world,” he said. “He is a great fool. What would he do with his continents if he got them?”

“What, indeed,” pondered her grace. “Continents—even kingdoms are not like kittens in a basket, or puppies to be trained to come to heel.”

“It is part of his monomania that he can persuade himself that they are little more.” Coombe’s eye-glasses had been slowly swaying from the ribbon in his fingers. He let them continue to sway a moment and then closed them with a snap.

“He is a great fool,” he said. “But we,—oh, my friend—and by ‘we’ I mean the rest of the Map of Europe—we are much greater fools. A mad dog loose among us and we sit—and smile.”

And this was in the days before the house with the cream-coloured front had put forth its first geraniums and lobelias in Feather’s window boxes. Robin was not born.

CHAPTER XVIII

 In the added suite of rooms at the back of the house, Robin grew through the years in which It was growing also. On the occasion when her mother saw her, she realized that she was not at least going to look like a barmaid. At no period of her least refulgent moment did she verge upon this type. Dowie took care of her and Mademoiselle Vallé educated her with the assistance of certain masters who came to give lessons in German and Italian.

“Why only German and Italian and French,” said Feather, “why not Latin and Greek, as well, if she is to be so accomplished?”

“It is modern languages one needs at this period. They ought to be taught in the Board Schools,” Coombe replied. “They are not accomplishments but workman’s tools. Nationalities are not separated as they once were. To be familiar with the language of one’s friends—and one’s enemies—is a protective measure.”

“What country need one protect oneself against? When all the kings and queens are either married to each other’s daughters or cousins or take tea with each other every year or so. Just think of the friendliness of Germany for instance——”

“I do,” said Coombe, “very often. That is one of the reasons I choose German rather than Latin and Greek. Julius Cæsar and Nero are no longer reasons for alarm.”

“Is the Kaiser with his seventeen children and his respectable Frau?” giggled Feather. “All that he cares about is that women shall be made to remember that they are born for nothing but to cook and go to church and have babies. One doesn’t wonder at the clothes they wear.”

It was not a month after this, however, when Lord Coombe, again warming himself at his old friend’s fire, gave her a piece of information.

“The German teacher, Herr Wiese, has hastily returned to his own country,” he said.

She lifted her eyebrows inquiringly.

“He found himself suspected of being a spy,” was his answer. “With most excellent reason. Some first-rate sketches of fortifications were found in a box he left behind him in his haste. The country—all countries—are sown with those like him. Mild spectacled students and clerks in warehous