“That perhaps is the only way in which wars of this kind will ever be brought to an end.  By women insisting on killing the kind of people who make them.  Rooting them out.  By a campaign of pursuit and assassination that will go on for years and years after the war itself is over....  Murder is such a little gentle punishment for the crime of war....  It would be hardly more than a reproach for what has happened.  Falling like snow.  Death after death.  Flake by flake.  This prince.  That statesman.  The count who writes so fiercely for war....  That is what I am going to do.  If Teddy is really dead....  We women were ready enough a year or so ago to starve and die for the Vote, and that was quite a little thing in comparison with this business....  Don’t you see what I mean?  It’s so plain and sensible, Cissie.  Whenever a man sits and thinks whether he will make a war or not, then he will think too of women, women with daggers, bombs; of a vengeance that will never tire nor rest; of consecrated patient women ready to start out upon a pilgrimage that will only end with his death....  I wouldn’t hurt these war makers.  No.  In spite of the poison gas.  In spite of trench feet and the men who have been made blind and the wounded who have lain for days, dying slowly in the wet.  Women ought not to hurt.  But I would kill.  Like killing dangerous vermin.  It would go on year by year.  Balkan kings, German princes, chancellors, they would have schemed for so much—­and come to just a rattle in the throat....  And if presently other kings and emperors began to prance about and review armies, they too would go....

“Until all the world understood that women would not stand war any more forever....

“Of course I shall do something of the sort.  What else is there to do now for me?”

Letty’s eyes were bright and intense, but her voice was soft and subdued.  She went on after a pause in the same casual voice.  “You see now, Cissie, why I cling to the idea that Teddy is alive.  If Teddy is alive, then even if he is wounded, he will get some happiness out of it—­and all this won’t be—­just rot.  If he is dead then everything is so desperately silly and cruel from top to bottom—­”

She smiled wanly to finish her sentence.

“But, Letty!” said Cissie, “there is the boy!”

“I shall leave the boy to you.  Compared with Teddy I don’t care that for the boy.  I never did.  What is the good of pretending?  Some women are made like that.”

She surveyed her knitting.  “Poor stitches,” she said....

“I’m hard stuff, Cissie.  I take after mother more than father.  Teddy is my darling.  All the tenderness of my life is Teddy.  If it goes, it goes....  I won’t crawl about the world like all these other snivelling widows.  If they’ve killed my man I shall kill.  Blood for blood and loss for loss.  I shall get just as close to the particular Germans who made this war as I can, and I shall kill them and theirs....