War took, but it gave also. It had taken Joey, for instance, but Joey
had had his great moment. It was better to have one great moment and die
than to drag on through useless years. And it was the same way with a
nation. A nation needed its hour. It was only in a crisis that it could
know its own strength. How many of them, who had been at that dinner
of Natalie's months before, had met their crisis bravely! Nolan was
in France now. Doctor Haverford was at the front. Audrey was nursing
Graham. Marion Hayden was in a hospital training-School. Rodney Page
was still building wooden barracks in a cantonment in Indiana, and was
making good. He himself-They could never go back, none of them, to the old smug, complacent,
luxurious days. They could no more go back than Joey could return to
life again. War was the irrevocable step, as final as death itself. And
he remembered something Nolan had said, just before he sailed.

"We have had one advantage, Clay. Or maybe it is not an advantage, after
all. Do you realize that you and I have lived through the Golden Age? We
have seen it come and seen it go. The greatest height of civilization,
since the world began, the greatest achievements, the most opulent
living. And we saw it all crash. It will be a thousand years before the
world will be ready for another."