Fraternal loyalty could not quite brook this.  “Brother Colburn is a perfectly honor’ble man,” said Ramsey, solemnly.  “He is one of the most honor’ble men in this—­”

“Of course!” she cried.  “Oh, can’t I make you understand that I’m not condemning him for a little flattery to me?  I don’t care two straws for his showing that I didn’t influence him.  He doesn’t interest me, please understand.”

Ramsey was altogether perplexed.  “Well, I don’t see what makes you go for him so hard, then.”

“I don’t.”

“But you said he was treach—­”

“I don’t condemn him for it,” she insisted, despairingly.  “Don’t you see the difference?  I’m not condemning anybody; I’m only lamenting.

“What about?

“About all of you that want war!”

“My golly!” Ramsey exclaimed.  “You don’t think those Dutchmen were right to drown babies and—­”

“No!  I think they were ghastly murderers!  I think they were detestable and fiendish and monstrous and—­”

“Well, then, my goodness!  What do you want?”

“I don’t want war!”

“You don’t?”

“I want Christianity!” she cried.  “I can’t think of the Germans without hating them, and so to-day, when all the world is hating them, I keep myself from thinking of them as much as I can.  Already half the world is full of war; you want to go to war to make things right, but it won’t; it will only make more war!”

“Well, I—­”

“Don’t you see what you’ve done, you boys?” she said.  “Don’t you see what you’ve done with your absurd telegram?  That started the rest; they thought they all had to send telegrams like that.”

“Well, the faculty—­”

“Even they mightn’t have thought of it if it hadn’t been for the first one.  Vengeance is the most terrible thought; once you put it into people’s minds that they ought to have it, it runs away with them.”

“Well, it isn’t mostly vengeance we’re after, at all.  There’s a lot more to it than just getting even with—­”

She did not heed him.  “You’re all blind!  You don’t see what you’re doing; you don’t even see what you’ve done to this peaceful place here.  You’ve filled it full of thoughts of fury and killing and massacre—­”

“Why, no,” said Ramsey.  “It was those Dutch did that to us; and, besides, there’s more to it than you—­”

“No, there isn’t,” she interrupted.  “It’s just the old brutal spirit that nations inherit from the time they were only tribes; it’s the tribe spirit, and an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  It’s those things and the love of fighting—­men have always loved to fight.  Civilization hasn’t taken it out of them; men still have the brute in them that loves to fight!”

“I don’t think so,” said Ramsey.  “Americans don’t love to fight; I don’t know about other countries, but we don’t.  Of course, here and there, there’s some fellow that likes to hunt around for scrapes, but I never saw more than three or four in my life that acted that way.  Of course a football team often has a scrapper or two on it, but that’s different.”