“Don’t you sometimes feel as though you’d like to go to France and fight?”

“What for?”

“Well, they need men, don’t they?”

“I guess they don’t need me, honey.  I’d be the dickens of a lot of use!  Never fired a gun in my life.”

“You could learn.  It isn’t hard.”

Harvey sat upright and stared at her.

“Oh, if you want me to go—­” he said, and waited.

Sara Lee twisted her ring on her finger.

“Nobody wants anybody to go,” she said not very elegantly.  “I’d just —­I’d rather like to think you wanted to go.”

That was almost too subtle for Harvey.  Something about him was rather reminiscent of Uncle James on mornings when he was determined not to go to church.

“It’s not our fight,” he said.  “And as far as that goes, I’m not so sure there isn’t right on both sides.  Or wrong.  Most likely wrong.  I’d look fine going over there to help the Allies, and then making up my mind it was the British who’d spilled the beans.  Now let’s talk about something interesting—­for instance, how much we love each other.”

It was always “we” with Harvey.  In his simple creed if a girl accepted a man and let him kiss her and wore his ring it was a reciprocal love affair.  It never occurred to him that sometimes as the evening dragged toward a close Sara Lee was just a bit weary of his arms, and that she sought, after he had gone, the haven of her little white room, and closed the door, and had to look rather a long time at his photograph before she was in a properly loving mood again.

But that night after his prolonged leave-taking Sara Lee went upstairs to her room and faced the situation.

She was going to marry Harvey.  She was committed to that.  And she loved him; not as he cared, perhaps, but he was a very definite part of her life.  Once or twice when he had been detained by business she had missed him, had put in a lonely and most unhappy evening.

Sara Lee had known comparatively few men.  In that small and simple circle of hers, with its tennis court in a vacant lot, its one or two inexpensive cars, its picnics and porch parties, there was none of the usual give and take of more sophisticated circles.  Boys and girls paired off rather early, and remained paired by tacit agreement; there was comparatively little shifting.  There were few free lances among the men, and none among the girls.  When she was seventeen Harvey had made it known unmistakably that Sara Lee was his, and no trespassing.  And for two years he had without intentional selfishness kept Sara Lee for himself.

That was how matters stood that January night when Sara Lee went upstairs after Harvey had gone and read Mabel’s letter, with Harvey’s photograph turned to the wall.  Under her calm exterior a little flame of rebellion was burning in her.  Harvey’s perpetual “we,” his attitude toward the war, and Mabel’s letter, with what it opened before her, had set the match to something in Sara Lee she did not recognize—­a strain of the adventurer, a throw-back to some wandering ancestor perhaps.  But more than anything it had set fire to the something maternal that is in all good women.