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WAR AND THE

keep silence and shrug his shoulders, wondering internally "what on earth these people see in it all." He is not even content to say out loud, "Well, I see nothing in it at all, and that's an end of it." He will invent reasons, which are not real reasons, to justify his own incapacity. He is not able to relish a good dinner; so he finds out all kinds of "reasons" to prove that dinner is nonsense, and poisonous nonsense at that. He will write long and learned books to show that savages in all ages liked their dinner; that people who believed in ghosts have always believed in dinner; that the dining propensities of the Samoyeds have always been notorious; that dinners were constantly eaten in the Minoan age; that the cave dwellers and the lake-dwellers were confirmed diners.