Page discovered this solution on one of these all-night self-communings.

It was almost two o'clock in the morning that he rose, said to himself, "I've got it!" and then went contentedly to bed.

And during the anxious months that followed the _Lusitania_, the _Arabic_, and those other outrages which have now taken their place in history, he spent night after night turning the matter over in his mind.

But he found no way out of the humiliations presented by the policy of Washington.
"Here we are swung loose in time," he wrote to his son Arthur, a few days after the first _Lusitania_ note had been sent to Germany, "nobody knows the day or the week or the month or the year--and we are caught on this island, with no chance of escape, while the vast slaughter goes on and seems just beginning, and the degradation of war goes on week by week; and we live in hope that the United States will come in, as the only chance to give us standing and influence when the reorganization of the world must begin.

(Beware of betraying the word 'hope'!) It has all passed far beyond anybody's power to describe.