“What did you say?”

“Nothin’.  I kind o’ started to—­but what’s the use?  She’s got that in her head.  Besides, how are you goin’ to argue about a thing with a person that’s crying about it?  I tell you, Fred, I guess we got to admit, after all, that ole girl certainly must have a lost of heart about her, anyway.  There may not be much fun to her—­though of course I wouldn’t know hardly any way to tell about that—­but there couldn’t be hardly any doubt she’s got a lot of feeling.  Well, and then she went on and said old men made wars, but didn’t fight; they left the fighting to the boys, and the suffering to the boy’s mothers.”

“Yes!” Fred exclaimed, and upon that he turned free of mirth for the moment.  “That’s the woman of it, I guess.  Send the old men to do the fighting!  For the matter of that, I guess my father’d about a thousand times go himself than see me and my brothers go; but Father’s so fat he can’t stoop!  You got to be able to stoop to dig a trench, I guess!  Well, suppose we sent our old men up against those Dutchmen; the Dutchmen would just kill the old men, and then come after the boys anyway, and the boys wouldn’t be ready, and they’d get killed, too; and then there wouldn’t be anybody but the Dutchmen left, and that’d be one fine world, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Ramsey.  “Course I thought of that.”

“Did you tell her?”

“No.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothin’.  I couldn’t get started anyway, but, besides, what was the use?  But she didn’t want the old men to go; she didn’t want anybody to go.”

“What did she want the country to do?” Fred asked, impatiently.

“Just what it has been doin’, I suppose.  Just let things simmer down, and poke along, and let them do what they like to us.”

“I guess so!” said Fred.  “Then, afterwhile, when they get some free time on their hands, they’ll come over and make it really interesting for us, because they know we won’t do anything but talk.  Yes, I guess the way things are settling down ought to suit Dora.  There isn’t goin’ to be any war.”

“She was pretty sure there was, though,” Ramsey said, thoughtfully.

“Oh, of course she was then.  We all thought so those few days.”

“No.  She said she thought it prob’ly wouldn’t come right away, but now it was almost sure to come sometime.  She said our telegrams and all the talk and so much feeling and everything showed her that the war thought that was always in people somewhere had been stirred up so it would go on and on.  She said she knew from the way she felt herself about the Lusitania that a feeling like that in her would never be absolutely wiped out as long as she lived.  But she said her other feeling about the horribleness of war taught her to keep the first feeling from breaking out, but with other people it wouldn’t; and even if war didn’t break out right then, it would always be ready to, all over the country, and sometime it would, though she was goin’ to do her share to fight it, herself, as long as she could stand.  She asked me wouldn’t I be one of the ones to help her.”