"No. I ain't ashamed and I ain't afraid. You know it ain't because I'm afraid. I've licked more fellows in my time than most fellows can boast. I--I got the Fifty-fifth Street fire rescue medal to my credit if anybody should ask you. I--I--ask anybody from my town if any kid in it ever licked me. But I ain't going to fight when I ain't got a grudge against no man. Call that being a coward if you like, but then you and me don't speak the same language." Her silence seemed to give off an icy vapor. "That's what they all say," she said. "It's like hiding behind a petticoat, hiding behind a defense like that. Sure you ain't got a grudge. Maybe you don't know what it's all about--God knows who does. Nobody can deny that. There ain't nothing reasonable about war, if there was there wouldn't be none. That talk don't get you nowheres. The proposition is that we're at war, whatever you or anybody else may think of it." "That's just it--we didn't have no say-so." "Just the same, Hal Sanderson, this great big grand country of ours is at war, and needs you. It ain't what you think any more that counts. Before we was in war you could talk all you wanted, but now that we're IN, there's only one thing to do, only one, and not all your fine talk about peace can change it. One thing to do. Fight!" "No government can make me--" "If you want peace now it's up to you to help make it, a new peace and a grander peace, not go baying at the moon after a peace that ain't no more." "You better get a soap box. If this is the way you got of trying to get out of something you're sorry for, I'll let you off easier--you don't need to try to---" She regarded him with her lips quivering, a quick layer of tears forming, trembling and venturing to the edge of her lashes. "Hal--Hal--a--a fellow that I've banked on like I have you! It ain't that--you know it ain't. I could have waited for ten times this long. It's only I--I'm ashamed, Hal. Ashamed. there ain't been a single gap in the chorus from one of the men enlisting that my heart ain't just dropped in my shoes like dough. I never envied a girl on my life the way I did Elaine Vavasour when she stood on the curb at the Battery the other day crying and watching Charlie Kirkpatrick go marching off. Charlie was a pacifist, too, as long as the country was out of war, and there was something to argue about. The minute the question was settled, he shut up, buckled on his belt and went! That's the kind of a pacifist to be. The kind of fellow that when he sees peace slipping, buckles on and starts out for a new peace; a realer peace. That's the kind of a fellow I thought you--you---" Her voice broke then abruptly, in a rain of tears, and she raised the crook of her arm to her face with the gesture of a child. "That--that's the kind of a fellow I--I---"