One failing had troubled her ever since she could remember--the tendency to disagree with opinions as soon as an overwhelming majority held them. It was partly due to the example of Mathilda’s own fastidiousness and independence of judgment, but she went farther than Mathilda, and supposed that she must have inherited this inconvenient trait from that mythical father of whom she had been told so little and longed to know so much. At all events, she arrived at certain conclusions, by herself, about the war: for example, that perhaps Germany was not entirely the instigator, that cruelties were probably practised on both sides--war’s horrors produced them--and that after all it did seem as though the whole world was furiously pitted against two or three caged-in nations. She did not entirely like herself for these heresies and kept silent upon them. But she promised herself the fun of an argument with Hal. How it would irritate him! “He’ll think I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps he’ll surrender me to the authorities. How wonderful--I wish he would!” She took one final glimpse of herself and walked slowly out of the room to face a hard day. She felt she would prove a formidable antagonist for Hal. But downstairs a surprise was waiting. She found Mathilda, suppressing a few tears, and her Uncle sitting in a profound study. Their disappointment communicated itself to her at once. Something had happened about Hal. Mrs. Seymour indicated the yellow night-letter on the table. “Dear Father and Aunt [it read]: Offered chance to join aviation training corps, Long Island, at once. No time to come home. Wish me luck enough to get over soon. Love. Hal.” Well, that was sensation enough for her. He had acted with divine independence. The months that followed until the Armistice were dull and tragic. She would a hundred times rather have gone over herself, though it be as a rank flag-waver. It was all stupid, cunning, criminal, got up by old men to kill young ones. It would be stupid enough to take Hal, her playmate. Night after night she saw him, mutilated or dead; she got so she could picture exactly the way a small hole looked in a man’s forehead, just the degree of red and blue about its tiny rim, and the relaxed, livid expression of a face that had been dead several hours. These pictures haunted her wakeful nights in many different guises, but always with Hal’s features. She learned in imagination how flesh looked when it was laid open or gangrened, and the appearance of the end of a limb that had been taken off. And she grew so bitter that she found she could not pray, though she had always experienced a soothing pleasure from the language of the Book of Common Prayer. She never said those pieces again. She would sit up suddenly in bed, as though she had been wakened by a barrage, and talk by fitful candlelight to her portrait. XI “And you aren’t really sorry you didn’t get over?” “Sorry? Wouldn’t you be?”