She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in the ironical way he always had with her plainer mind.  But the only thing was to be outspoken with him.

“George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and every cost.  If I’ve tried to talk you into anything, I take it all back.”

“Oh, I know that, Editha.  I know how sincere you are, and how—­I wish I had your undoubting spirit!  I’ll think it over; I’d like to believe as you do.  But I don’t, now; I don’t, indeed.  It isn’t this war alone; though this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it’s every war—­so stupid; it makes me sick.  Why shouldn’t this thing have been settled reasonably?”

“Because,” she said, very throatily again, “God meant it to be war.”

“You think it was God?  Yes, I suppose that is what people will say.”

“Do you suppose it would have been war if God hadn’t meant it?”

“I don’t know.  Sometimes it seems as if God had put this world into men’s keeping to work it as they pleased.”

“Now, George, that is blasphemy.”

“Well, I won’t blaspheme.  I’ll try to believe in your pocket Providence,” he said, and then he rose to go.

“Why don’t you stay to dinner?” Dinner at Balcom’s Works was at one o’clock.

“I’ll come back to supper, if you’ll let me.  Perhaps I shall bring you a convert.”

“Well, you may come back, on that condition.”

“All right.  If I don’t come, you’ll understand?”

He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of their engagement.  It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it.  While she stood looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows, on to the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness.

“Why didn’t he stay to dinner?”

“Because—­because—­war has been declared,” Editha pronounced, without turning.

Her mother said, “Oh, my!” and then said nothing more until she had sat down in one of the large Shaker chairs, and rocked herself for some time.  Then she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there had been in her mind with the spoken words, “Well, I hope he won’t go.”

“And I hope he will” the girl said, and confronted her mother with a stormy exaltation that would have frightened any creature less unimpressionable than a cat.

Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of cogitation.  What she arrived at in speech was, “Well, I guess you’ve done a wicked thing, Editha Balcom.”

The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her mother had come out by, “I haven’t done anything—­yet.”

* * * * *

In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts from Gearson, down to the withered petals of the first flower he had offered, with that timidity of his veiled in that irony of his.  In the heart of the packet she enshrined her engagement ring which she had restored to the pretty box he had brought it her in.  Then she sat down, if not calmly yet strongly, and wrote: