“Marta, you are unjust!” exclaimed Lanstron, for he revered Partow as disciple reveres master.  “Partow has the iron cross!”—­the prized iron cross given to both officers and men of the Browns for exceptional courage in action and for that alone.  “He won it leading a second charge with a bullet in his arm, after he had lost thirty per cent, of his regiment.  The second charge succeeded.”

“Yes, I understand,” she went on a little wildly.  “And perhaps the colonel on the other side, who fought just as bravely and had even heavier losses, did not get the bronze cross of the Grays because he failed.  Yes, I understand that bravery is a requisite of the military cult.  You must take some risk or you will not cause enough slaughter to win either iron or bronze crosses.  And, Lanny, are you a person of such distinction in the business of killing that you also will be out of danger?”

She had forgotten about the telephone; she had forgotten the picture of dare-devil nerve he made when he rose from the wreck of his plane.  If his work were to make war, her work was against war—­the mission of her life as she saw it in the intense, passionate moments when some new absurdity of its processes appeared to her.  She was ready to seize any argument his talk offered to combat the things for which he stood.  She did not see, as her eyes poured her hot indignation into his, that his maimed hand was twitching or how he bit his lips and flushed before he replied: 

“Each one goes where he is sent, link by link, down from the chief of staff.  Only in this way can you have that solidarity, that harmonious efficiency which means victory.”

“An autocracy, a tyranny over the lives of all the adult males in countries that boast of the ballot and self-governing institutions!” she put in.

“But I hope,” he went on, with the quickening pulse and eager smile that used to greet a call from Feller to “set things going” in their cadet days, “that I may take out a squadron of dirigibles.  After all this spy business, that would be to my taste.”

“And if you caught a regiment in close formation with a shower of bombs, that would be positively heavenly, wouldn’t it?” She bent nearer to him, her eyes flaming demand and satire.

“No!  War—­necessary, horrible, hellish!” he replied.  Something in her seemed to draw out the brutal truth she had asked for in place of euphonious terms.

“You apparently know where your profession ought to feel perfectly at home—­but what is the use?  What?” She put her hands over her face and shuddered.  “I grow savage; but it is because I have known you so well and because everything you say brings up its answer irresistibly to my mind.  I keep thinking of what mother said at luncheon—­of her certainty that war is coming.  I see the garden spattered with blood, the wounded and the dying—­an eddy in the conflict!  And I am in a controversial eddy whirling round and round away from the main current of what you were to tell me.”  She let her hands drop, but her eyes still held their lights of hostility.  “Go on.  I listen!”