“We used to talk in those first days about the ‘spiritual effect’ of the war,” he resumed dreamily, speaking more to himself than to his companion.  “As if organized violence could have a steadying effect—­could have any results that are not the offspring of violence.  It is hard for me to talk about it.  I’ve never even tried before to put it into words; but we are both suffering from the same cause, I think.  I know it has played the very deuce with my life.  It has made me discontented with what I have; but it hasn’t shown me anything else that was worth striving for.  I seem to have lost the power of wanting because I’ve discovered that nothing is worth having after you get it.  Every apple has turned into Dead Sea fruit.”

He had never before spoken so freely, and when he had finished he felt awkward and half resentful.  Margaret’s extraordinary frankness had started him, he supposed, on a similar strain; but he wished that he had kept back all that sentimental nonsense about what his mother called disapprovingly, his “frame of mind.”  Any frame of mind except the permanently settled appeared unsafe to Mrs. Culpeper; and her son felt at the moment that her opinion was justified.  Somehow the whole thing seemed to have resulted from his meeting with Gideon Vetch.  It was Vetch who had “unsettled” him, who had taken the wind out of the stiff sails of his prejudices.  Had the war awakened in him, he wondered, the need of crude emotional stimulants, the dangerous allurement of the unfamiliar, the exotic?  Would it ever pass, and would life become again normal and placid without losing its zest and its interest?  For it was the zest of life, he realized, that he had encountered in Gideon Vetch.

“But you are a man,” Margaret was saying plaintively.  “Everything is easier for a man.  You can go out and do things.”

“So can women now.  You can even go into politics.”

She made a pretty gesture of aversion.  “Oh, I’ve been too well brought up!  There isn’t any hope for a girl who is well brought up except the church, and even there she can’t do anything but sit and listen to sermons.  Mother’s consolation,” she added with a soft little laugh, “is that I should have been a belle and beauty in the days when Madison was President.”

Then putting the subject aside as if she had finished with it for ever, she began talking to him about the books she was reading.  Of all the girls he knew she was the only one who ever opened a book except one that had been forbidden.

An hour later, when Margaret went home with her father, Stephen turned back, after putting her into the car, with a warmer emotion in his heart than he had ever felt for her before.  She was not only lovely and gentle; she had revealed unexpected qualities of mind which might develop later into an attraction that he had never dreamed she could possess.  Never, he felt, had the outlook appeared so desirable.  He was in that particular dreaminess of mood when