“It’s war,” he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at first.  She never knew what to think of him; that made his mystery, his charm.  All through their courtship, which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it.  He seemed to despise it even more than he abhorred it.  She could have understood his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed and took up the law.  But making light of a cause so high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being.  Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself.  Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him, In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that.  He sank down on the top step, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her question of the origin and authenticity of his news.

All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to take, for the completion of her ideal of him.  He was very nearly perfect as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself.  But he was peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity.  Before her reasoning went her emotioning:  her nature pulling upon his nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means she was using to the end she was willing.  She had always supposed that the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something.  George Gearson had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking.  But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her—­be a hero, her hero—­it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander.  Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.

“But don’t you see, dearest,” she said, “that it wouldn’t have come to this, if it hadn’t been in the order of Providence?  And I call any war glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling for years against the cruelest oppression.  Don’t you think so too?”

“I suppose so,” he returned, languidly.  “But war!  Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?”

“That ignoble peace!  It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates.”  She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words.  She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax:  “But now it doesn’t matter about the how or why.  Since the war has come, all that is gone.  There are no two sides, any more.  There is nothing now but our country.”