All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to take, for the completion of her ideal of him.  He was very nearly perfect as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself.  But he was peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity.  Before her reasoning went her emotioning:  her nature pulling upon his nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means she was using to the end she was willing.  She had always supposed that the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something.  George Gearson had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking.  But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her—­be a hero, her hero—­it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander.  Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.

“But don’t you see, dearest,” she said, “that it wouldn’t have come to this if it hadn’t been in the order of Providence?  And I call any war glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling for years against the cruelest oppression.  Don’t you think so, too?”

“I suppose so,” he returned, languidly.  “But war!  Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?”

“That ignoble peace!  It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates.”  She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words.  She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax:  “But now it doesn’t matter about the how or why.  Since the war has come, all that is gone.  There are no two sides any more.  There is nothing now but our country.”

He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda, and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, “Our country—­right or wrong.”

“Yes, right or wrong!” she returned, fervidly.  “I’ll go and get you some lemonade.”  She rose rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with two tall glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice clucking in them, he still sat as she had left him, and she said, as if there had been no interruption:  “But there is no question of wrong in this case.  I call it a sacred war.  A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there was one.  And I know you will see it just as I do, yet.”

He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass down:  “I know you always have the highest ideal.  When I differ from you I ought to doubt myself.”

A generous sob rose in Editha’s throat for the humility of a man, so very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below her.