It was not as though he were a pacifist by conviction, religious or other.

She had seen him rout and trample on not a few genuine professors of the faith.

His whole opposition to the war rested on the limitations and discomforts inflicted on his own life.

It reminded her of certain fragments of dialogue she had overheard in the winter, where she had chanced to find herself alone in a railway carriage full of a group of disaffected workmen returning from a strike meeting at Leicester.

'If there are many like these, is the country worth saving ?' she was saying to herself all the time, in a dumb passion.
Yet, after all, those men had done months and years of labour for the country.