The lemonade was delicious, and Aunt Claudia forced herself to be gracious.  Caroline Paine was gracious without an effort.  She liked Dalton.  Not in the same way, perhaps, that she liked Major Prime, but he was undoubtedly handsome, and of a world which wore lovely clothes and did not have to count its pennies.

Major Prime had little to say.  He was content to sit there in the fragrant night and listen to the rest.  A year ago he had been jolted over rough roads in an ambulance.  There had been a moon and men groaning.  There had seemed to him something sinister about that white night with its spectral shadows, and with the trenches of the enemy wriggling like great serpents underground.  The trail of the serpent was still over the world.  He had been caught but not killed.  There was still poison in his fangs!

He spoke sharply, therefore, when Dalton said, “It was a great adventure for a lot of fellows who went over——­”

“Don’t,” said the Major, and sat up.  “Does it matter what took them? The thing that matters is how they came back——­”

“What do you mean?”

“A thousand reasons took them over.  Some of them went because they had to, some of them because they wanted to.  Some of them dramatized themselves as heroes and hoped for an opportunity to demonstrate their courage.  Some of them were scared stiff, but went because of their consciences, some of them wanted to fight and some of them didn’t, but whatever the reason, they went.  And now they are back, and it is much more important to know what they think now about war than what they thought about it when they were enlisted or drafted.  If their baptism of fire has made them hate cruelty and injustice, if it has opened their eyes to the dangers of a dreaming idealism which refuses to see evil until evil has had its way, if it has made them swear to purge America of the things which has made Germany the slimy crawling enemy of the universe, if they have come back feeling that God is in His Heaven but that things can’t be right with the world until we come to think in terms of personal as well as of national righteousness—­if they have come back thus illumined, then we can concede to them their great adventure.  But if they have come back to forget that democracy is on trial, that we have talked of it to other nations and do not know it ourselves, if they have come back to let injustice or ignorance rule—­then they had better have died on the fields of France——­”

He stopped suddenly amid a startled silence.  Not a sound from any of them.

“I beg your pardon,” he laughed a bit awkwardly, “I didn’t mean to preach a sermon.”

“Don’t spoil it, please,” Aunt Claudia begged brokenly; “I wish more men would speak out.”

“May I say this, then, before I stop?  The future of our country is in the hands of the men who fought in France.  On them must descend the mantles of our great men, Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt—­we must walk with these spirits if we love America——­”