Managerial watchfulness must have gone to sleep for once.  He played Scotch melodies, and the Parisians liked them, and when he had finished they called him back.  Joan and her friends occupied a box close to the stage.  The wooden-looking Scot glanced up at her, and their eyes met.  And as the applause died down there rose the first low warning strains of the Pibroch.  Joan sat up in her chair and her lips parted.  The savage music quickened.  It shrilled and skrealed.  The blood came surging through her veins.

And suddenly something lying hidden there leaped to life within her brain.  A mad desire surged hold of her to rise and shout defiance at those three thousand pairs of hostile eyes confronting her.  She clutched at the arms of her chair and so kept her seat.  The pibroch ended with its wild sad notes of wailing, and slowly the mist cleared from her eyes, and the stage was empty.  A strange hush had fallen on the house.

She was not aware that her hostess had been watching her.  She was a sweet-faced, white-haired lady.  She touched Joan lightly on the hand.  “That’s the trouble,” she whispered.  “It’s in our blood.”

Could we ever hope to eradicate it?  Was not the survival of this fighting instinct proof that war was still needful to us?  In the sculpture-room of an exhibition she came upon a painted statue of Bellona.  Its grotesqueness shocked her at first sight, the red streaming hair, the wild eyes filled with fury, the wide open mouth—­one could almost hear it screaming—­the white uplifted arms with outstretched hands!  Appalling!  Terrible!  And yet, as she gazed at it, gradually the thing grew curiously real to her.  She seemed to hear the gathering of the chariots, the neighing of the horses, the hurrying of many feet, the sound of an armouring multitude, the shouting, and the braying of the trumpets.

These cold, thin-lipped calculators, arguing that “War doesn’t pay”; those lank-haired cosmopolitans, preaching their “International,” as if the only business of mankind were wages!  War still was the stern school where men learnt virtue, duty, forgetfulness of self, faithfulness unto death.

This particular war, of course, must be stopped:  if it were not already too late.  It would be a war for markets; for spheres of commercial influence; a sordid war that would degrade the people.  War, the supreme test of a nation’s worth, must be reserved for great ideals.  Besides, she wanted to down Carleton.

One of the women on her list, and the one to whom Mrs. Denton appeared to attach chief importance, a Madame de Barante, disappointed Joan.  She seemed to have so few opinions of her own.  She had buried her young husband during the Franco-Prussian war.  He had been a soldier.  And she had remained unmarried.  She was still beautiful.

“I do not think we women have the right to discuss war,” she confided to Joan in her gentle, high-bred voice.  “I suppose you think that out of date.  I should have thought so myself forty years ago.  We talk of ‘giving’ our sons and lovers, as if they were ours to give.  It makes me a little angry when I hear pampered women speak like that.  It is the men who have to suffer and die.  It is for them to decide.”