like callosities that come from a man's work.

Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and
determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood
smoke and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow-
fields and the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep
gorges far below. It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses
and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial German and
Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that
I will tell of in another section. But the white passion of human
service was our dominant theme. Not simply perhaps nor altogether
unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a frequent self-
forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and noble things, to help in
their developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life. It
is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present in a page or two
the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation,
conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges
carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly
resuming a constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and
jest and go and come back, and all the while build.

We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose
beneath all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline.
"Muddle," said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this
day. Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know
for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly
painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us
the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial country-
side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations,
wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I remember