table. "Now tell me about your own book. Major Stroud spoke of it the other night, and seemed to think it was to blame for the accident."
He laughed.
"He thinks it's to blame for everything. It's very dull, I'm afraid. It's about religions. They're my hobby. Not religion; religions. There's a difference, you see. I've tried to write a book that . . . well, how shall I explain it? . . . pulls them all together. Brings out their similarities. Fuses them, so to speak. It's tremendously interesting work and means a lot of research, and I like that."
"How long have you been working on it?"
"Oh . . . not very long. Let me see. . . . I started it in 1910. Twelve years. Well, I suppose that is a fairly long time. But you see the war interrupted things."
"There were four years when I suppose you did no work on it at all."
"I managed to get in a lot of reading. I was studying Druidism when I was in the trenches—most absorbing study. That was when things were fairly peaceful, of course. And when they weren't peaceful, one was . . . well, testing various beliefs, if you know what I mean. When
