"I know," Amory interrupted, "I've heard it all. But I'm not going to talk propaganda with you. There's a chance that you're right--but even so we're hundreds of years before the time when non-resistance can touch us as a reality."
"But, Amory, listen--"
"Burne, we'd just argue--"
"Very well."
"Just one thing--I don't ask you to think of your family or friends, because I know they don't count a picayune with you beside your sense of duty--but, Burne, how do you know that the magazines you read and the societies you join and these idealists you meet aren't just plain German?"
"Some of them are, of course."
"How do you know they aren't all pro-German--just a lot of weak ones--with German-Jewish names."
"That's the chance, of course," he said slowly. "How much or how little I'm taking this stand because of propaganda I've heard, I don't know; naturally I think that it's my most innermost conviction--it seems a path spread before me just now."
Amory's heart sank.
"But think of the cheapness of it--no one's really going to martyr you for being a pacifist--it's just going to throw you in with the worst--"
"I doubt it," he interrupted.
"Well, it all smells of Bohemian New York to me."
"I know what you mean, and that's why I'm not sure I'll agitate."
"You're one man, Burne--going to talk to people who won't listen--with all God's given you."
"That's what Stephen must have thought many years ago. But he preached his sermon and they killed him. He probably thought as he was dying what a waste it all was. But you see, I've always felt that Stephen's death was the thing that occurred to Paul on the road to Damascus, and sent him to preach the word of Christ all over the world."
"Go on."
"That's all--this is my particular duty. Even if right now I'm just a pawn--just sacrificed. God! Amory--you don't think I like the Germans!"
"Well, I can't say anything else--I get to the end of all the logic about non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle, stands the huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. And this spectre stands right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi's, and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche's--" Amory broke off suddenly. "When are you going?"
"I'm going next week."
"I'll see you, of course."