It was Thurston’s idea of a joke.  He would have been startled if he had known into what a trembling balance his sledge-hummer wit cast its unlucky weight.  The balance quivered at the blow, shook back and forth an instant and fell heavily.  Jim Barlow wheeled, sprang down the stone steps and bolted up the street, panting as one who has escaped a wild beast.  Thurston had said it.  That was what was due to happen.  It was now three o’clock; Barlow fled up State Street to the big hotel and took a room and locked his door and threw himself on the bed.  What was he to do?  After weeks of hesitation he had come to the decision that he would offer himself to his country.  He saw—­none plainer—­the reasons why it was fit and right so to do.  Other men were giving up homes and careers and the whole bright and easy side of life—­why not he?  It was the greatest cause to fight for in the world’s history—­should he not fight for it?  How, after the war, might he meet friends, his own people, his children to come, if he alone of his sort had no honorable record to show?  Such arguments, known to all, he repeated, even aloud he repeated them, tossing miserably about the bed in his hotel room.  And his mind at once accepted them, but that was all.  His spirit failed to spring to his mind’s support with the throb of emotion which is the spark that makes the engine go.  The wheels went around over and over but the connection was not made.  The human mind is useful machinery, but it is only the machine’s master, the soul, which can use it.  Over and over he got to his feet and spoke aloud:  “Now I will go.”  Over and over a repulsion seized him so strongly that his knees gave way and he fell back on the bed.  If he had a mother, he thought, she might have helped, but there was no one.  Mary—­but he could not risk Mary’s belief in his courage.  Only a mother would have understood entirely.

With that, sick at heart, the hideous sea of counter arguments, arguments of a slacker, surged upon him.  What would it all matter a hundred years from now?  Wasn’t he more useful in his place keeping up the industries of the nation?  Wasn’t he a bigger asset to America as an alive engineer, an expert in his work, than as mere cannon fodder, one of thousands to be shot into junk in a morning’s “activity”—­just one of them?  Because the Germans were devils why should he let them reach over here, away over here, and drag him out of a decent and happy life and throw him like dirt into the horrible mess they had made, and leave him dead or worse—­mangled and useless.  Then, again—­there were plenty of men mad to fight; why not let them?  Through a long afternoon he fought with the beasts, and dinner-time came and he did not notice, and at last he rose and, telephoning first to Mary a terse message that he would not be able to come this evening, he went out, hardly knowing what he did, and wandered up town.