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cluster of bubbles—the guests of the yacht Bessie Budd, for example. One by one the bub bles

break, and their substance returns to the ocean, and in due course becomes the

substance of new bubbles.

This theory obliged you to believe that a medium had the power to dip into this mind

substance and get facts to which the medium did not have access in any normal way. Was

it easier to believe that than to believe that the spirits of dead persons were sending

communications to the living? Lanny found it so; for he had lived long enough to watch

the human mind develop along with the body and to decay along with it. In some strange

way the two seemed to be bound together and to share the same fate. But don't fool

yourself into thinking that you knew what the nature of that union was; how a thought

could make a muscle move, or how a chemical change in the body could produce cheerful

or depressed thoughts. Those questions were going to take wiser men than Lanny Budd

to answer them; he kept wishing that people would stop robbing and killing one another

and settle down to this task of finding out what they really were.

VI

The hundred-dollar-an-hour cruise was continued eastward, and presently they were

approaching the Peninsula of Gallipoli, where so many Englishmen had paid with their

lives for the blundering of their superiors. Great ships had gone down, and the beaches

had been piled with mangled bodies. Among the many wounded had been the father of

Lanny's amie, Rosemary Codwilliger, Countess of Sandhaven. He had "passed over" not

long ago, and Lanny wondered, did his spirit haunt this place? He asked Tecumseh about

it, and it wasn't long before Colonel Codwilliger was "manifesting"; but unfortunately

Lanny hadn't known him very well, and must write to Rosemary in the Argentine to find

out if the statements were correct.

They passed through the Dardanelles on a gusty, rainy afternoon, and the shores

looked much like any other shores veiled in mist. Lanny and Bess walked for a while on

deck, and then went into the saloon and played the Schubert four-hand piano sonata.

Then Lanny came out again, for somewhere ahead was the Island of Prinkipo which had

been so much in his thoughts at the Peace Conference eleven years before. It had been chosen

as the place for a meeting with the Bolsheviks, in President Wilson's effort to patch up a truce

with them. The elder statesmen had found it difficult to believe there existed a place with such

a musical-comedy name.

It might as well have been a musical-comedy performance—such was Lanny's bitter reflection.

The statesmen didn't go to Prinkipo, and when later they met the Russians at Genoa they didn't

settle anything. They went home to get ready for another war—Lanny was one of those

pessimistic persons who were sure it was on the way. He told people so, and they would shrug

their shoulders. What could they do about it? What could anybody do? C'est la nature!

Perhaps it was the rain which caused these melancholy thoughts; perhaps the spirits of those

tens of thousands of dead Englishmen and Turks; or perhaps of the dogs of Constantinople,

which during the war had been gathered up and turned loose on this musical- comedy island to

starve and devour one another. Under the religion of the country it was not permitted to kill

them, so let them eat one another! The Prophet, born among a nomadic people, had loved the

dog and praised it as the guardian of the tent; he had endeavored to protect it, but had not been

able to foresee great cities with swarms of starveling curs and a denouement of cannibalism.

The southern hills of this Sea of Marmora had been the scene of events about which Lanny had

heard his father talking with Zaharoff. The munitions king had financed the invasion of Turkey

by his fellow-Greeks, spending half his fortune on it, so he had said— though of course you

didn't have to assume that everything he said was true. Anyhow, the Greeks had been routed

and hosts of them driven into the sea, after which the victorious Turkish army had appeared

before the British fortifications and the guns of the fleet. This critical situation had brought

about the fall of the Lloyd George government and thus played hob with the plans of Robbie

Budd for getting oil concessions. Robbie was one of those men who use governments, his own

and others', threatening wars and sometimes waging them; while Lanny was an amiable

playboy who traveled about on a hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht, making beautiful music,

reading books of history and psychic research, and being troubled in his conscience about the

way the world was going. He asked his friends very earnestly what ought to be done. Some thought

they knew; but the trouble was, their opinions differed so greatly;

VII

The company went ashore in the crowded city, which had once been the capital of the Moslem

world, and now was known as Istanbul. They got cars, as usual, and were driven about to see