“You needn’t trouble about building the fort, Mr. Bushwick.  I’ve had the farmer and his men working at the castle since daybreak, and the ladies will find it all ready for them, when they’re ready to defend it, down in the meadow beyond the edge of the birch-lot.  The battle won’t begin till eleven o’clock.”

She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her guests crushed about her, demanding to be allowed at least to go and look at the castle immediately.

One of the men’s voices asked, “May I be one of the defenders, Mrs. Westangle?  I want to be on the winning side, sure.”

“Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race?” another lamented.

“No, indeed,” a girl cried, “it’s to be the real thing.”

It fell to Verrian, in the assortment of couples in which Mrs. Westangle’s guests sallied out to view the proposed scene of action, to find himself, not too willingly, at Miss Macroyd’s side.  In his heart and in his mind he was defending the amusement which he instantly divined as no invention of Mrs. Westangle’s, and both his heart and his mind misgave him about this first essay of Miss Shirley in her new enterprise.  It was, as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and at the same time it had a danger in it of being tomboyish.  Golf, tennis, riding, boating, swimming—­all the vigorous sports in which women now excel—­were boldly athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they were tomboyish.  Was it because the bent of Miss Shirley was so academic that she was periling upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this primal inspiration of hers?  Inwardly he resented the word academic, although outwardly he had assented to it when Miss Macroyd proposed it.  To be academic would be even more fatal to Miss Shirley’s ambition than to be tomboyish, and he thought with pathos of that touch about the Italian nobility in the Middle Ages, and how little it could have moved the tough fancies of that crowd of well-groomed young people at the breakfast-table when Mrs. Westangle brought it out with her ignorant acceptance of it as a social force.  After all, Miss Macroyd was about the only one who could have felt it in the way it was meant, and she had chosen to smile at it.  He wondered if possibly she could feel the secondary pathos of it as he did.  But to make talk with her he merely asked: 

“Do you intend to take part in the fray?”

“Not unless I can be one of the reserve corps that won’t need to be brought up till it’s all over.  I’ve no idea of getting my hair down.”

“Ah,” he sighed, “you think it’s going to be rude:” 

“That is one of the chances.  But you seem to be suffering about it, Mr. Verrian!” she said, and, of course, she laughed.

“Who?  I?” he returned, in the temptation to deny it.  But he resisted.  “I always suffer when there’s anything silly happening, as if I were doing it myself.  Don’t you?”

“No, thank you, I believe not.  But perhaps you are doing this?  One can’t suppose Mrs. Westangle imagined it.”