She wondered what they were and decided that they were part of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, bound for Ostend.

All those people had the look that John had, of having found what they had wanted, of being satisfied, appeased.  Even Sutton had it, lying on the top of his sadness, like a light.  They felt precisely as she was feeling—­all those people.

And through her wonder she remained aware of John Conway as he walked the deck, passing and passing in front of her.

She got up and walked with him.

The two women stared at them as they passed.  One, the tall one, whispered something to the other.

“John—­do my knees show awfully as I walk?”

“No.  Of course they don’t.  Gwinnie’s do.  She doesn’t know what to do with them.”

He looked down at her and smiled.

“I like you.  I like you in that cap.  You look as if you were sailing fast against a head wind, as if you could cut through anything.”

Their turn brought them again under the women’s eyes.  He took her arm and drew her aside to the rail of the boat’s stern.  They stood there, watching the wake boiling and breaking and thinning, a white lace of froth on the glassy green.  Sutton passed them.

“What’s the matter with him?” she said.

“The War.  He’s got it on his mind.  It’s no use taking it like that, Jeanne, as one consummate tragedy ...  How are you feeling about it?”

“I don’t think I’m feeling anything—­except wanting to get there.  And wanting—­wanting frightfully—­to help.”

“Unless you can go into it as if it was some tremendous, happy adventure—­That’s the only way to take it.  I shouldn’t be any good if I didn’t feel it was the most romantic thing that ever happened to me....  To have let everything go, to know that nothing matters, that it doesn’t matter if you’re killed, or mutilated ...  Of course I want to help, but that would be nothing without the gamble.  The danger.”

He stopped suddenly in his turning and held her with his shining, excited eyes.

“War’s the most romantic thing that ever happened ...  False romance, my father calls it.  Jolly little romance about him.  He’ll simply make pots of money out of the war, selling motors to the Government.”

“It’s rather—­romantic of him to give us those two ambulances, and pay for us.”

“Is it?  Think of the kudos he gets out of it, and the advertisement for Roden and Conway, the stinking paragraphs he’ll put in the papers about himself:  ’His second son, Mr. John Roden Conway, is taking out two Roden field ambulance cars which he will drive himself—­’Mr. John Roden Conway and his field ambulance car.  A Roden, 30 horse power.’  He makes me sick.”

She saw again, with a renewal of her pang, the old man, the poor, kind man.  Perhaps he wouldn’t put the paragraphs in the papers.

“False romance.  He lied.  There’s no such thing as false romance.  Romance is a state of mind.  A state of mind can’t be false or true.  It simply exists.  It hasn’t any relation to reality.  It is reality, the most real part of us.  When it’s dead we’re dead.”