He did not like her manner, one evening when she came to the house.  As he helped her off with her cloak, a sleek supple leopard skin which fitted her figure like a glove, he asked,

“Where’s Hal this evening?” And she answered lightly,

“Oh, don’t ask me what he does with himself.”

“You mean, I suppose,” said Edith, with quiet disapproval, “that he is rushed to death this year with all this business from the war.”

“Yes, it’s business,” Laura replied, as she deftly smoothed and patted her soft, abundant, reddish hair.  “And it’s war, too,” she added.

“What do you mean?” her father asked.  He knew what she meant, war with her husband.  But before Laura could answer him, Edith cut in hastily, for two of her children were present.  At dinner she turned the talk to the war.  But even on this topic, Laura’s remarks were disturbing.  She did not consider the war wholly bad—­by no means, it had many good points.  It was clearing away a lot of old rubbish, customs, superstitions and institutions out of date.  “Musty old relics,” she called them.  She spoke as though repeating what someone else had told her.  Laura with her chicken’s mind could never have thought it all out by herself.  When asked what she meant, she was smilingly vague, with a glance at Edith’s youngsters.  But she threw out hints about the church and even Christianity, as though it were falling to pieces.  She spoke of a second Renaissance, “a glorious pagan era” coming.  And then she exploded a little bomb by inquiring of Edith.

“What do you think the girls over there are going to do for husbands, with half the marriageable men either killed or hopelessly damaged?  They’re not going to be nuns all their lives!”

Again her sister cut her off, and the rest of the brief evening was decidedly awkward.  Yes, she was changing, growing fast.  And Roger did not like it.  Here she was spending money like water, absorbed in her pleasures, having no baby, apparently at loose ends with her husband, and through it all so cocksure of herself and her outrageous views about war, and smiling about them with such an air, and in her whole manner, such a tone of amused superiority.  She talked about a world for the strong, bits of gabble from Nietzsche and that sort of rot; she spoke blithely of a Rome reborn, the “Wings of the Eagles” heard again.  This part of it she had taken, no doubt, from her new Italian friend, her husband’s shrapnel partner.

Pshaw!  What was Laura up to?

But that was only one evening.  It was not repeated, another month went quickly by, and Roger had soon shaken it from him, for he had troubles enough at home.  One daughter at a time, he had thought.  And as the dark clouds close above him had cleared, the other cloud too had drifted away, until it was small, just on the horizon, far away from Roger’s house.  What was Laura up to?  He barely ever thought of that now.