Chapter CXXXVI: Section 8

_Your boy, as no doubt you know, dreamt constantly of such a world
peace as this that I foreshadow; he was more generous than his
country. He could envisage war and hostility only as
misunderstanding. He thought that a world that could explain itself
clearly would surely be at peace. He was scheming always therefore
for the perfection and propagation of Esperanto or Ido, or some such
universal link. My youngster too was full of a kindred and yet
larger dream, the dream of human science, which knows neither king
nor country nor race_....

_These boys, these hopes, this war has killed_....

That fragment ended so. Mr. Britling ceased to read for a time. "But has it killed them?" he whispered....

"If you had lived, my dear, you and your England would have talked with a younger Germany--better than I can ever do...."

He turned the pages back, and read here and there with an accumulating discontent.