“The Women’s Association for the Extirpation of the whole breed of War Lords,” she threw out.  “If I do happen to hurt—­does it matter?”

She looked at her sister’s shocked face and smiled again.

“You think I go about staring at nothing,” she remarked....  “Not a bit of it!  I have been planning all sorts of things....  I have been thinking how I could get to Germany....  Or one might catch them in Switzerland....  I’ve had all sorts of plans.  They can’t go guarded for ever....

“Oh, it makes me despise humanity to see how many soldiers and how few assassins there are in the world....  After the things we have seen.  If people did their duty by the dagger there wouldn’t be such a thing as a War Lord in the world.  Not one....  The Kaiser and his sons and his sons’ sons would know nothing but fear now for all their lives.  Fear would only cease to pursue as the coffin went down into the grave.  Fear by sea, fear by land, for the vessel he sailed in, the train he travelled in, fear when he slept for the death in his dreams, fear when he waked for the death in every shadow; fear in every crowd, fear whenever he was alone.  Fear would stalk him through the trees, hide in the corner of the staircase; make all his food taste perplexingly, so that he would want to spit it out....”

She sat very still brooding on that idea for a time, and then stood up.

“What nonsense one talks!” she cried, and yawned.  “I wonder why poor Teddy doesn’t send me a post card or something to tell me his address.  I tell you what I am afraid of sometimes about him, Cissie.”

“Yes?” said Cissie.

“Loss of memory.  Suppose a beastly lump of shell or something whacked him on the head....  I had a dream of him looking strange about the eyes and not knowing me.  That, you know, really may have happened....  It would be beastly, of course....”

Cissie’s eyes were critical, but she had nothing ready to say.

There were some moments of silence.

“Oh! bed,” said Letty.  “Though I shall just lie scheming.”

Section 2

Cissie lay awake that night thinking about her sister as if she had never thought about her before.

She began to weigh the concentrated impressions of a thousand memories.  She and her sister were near in age; they knew each other with an extreme intimacy, and yet it seemed to Cissie that night as though she did not know Letty at all.  A year ago she would have been certain she knew everything about her.  But the old familiar Letty, with the bright complexion, and the wicked eye, with her rebellious schoolgirl insistence upon the beautifulness of “Boof’l young men,” and her frank and glowing passion for Teddy, with her delight in humorous mystifications and open-air exercise and all the sunshine and laughter of life, this sister Letty, who had been so satisfactory