As the two swung out on the sidewalk, he was silent with the vague mulling of this. “Could we walk?” Lory suggested. “Is there time?” He welcomed it. They went up Wabash Avenue with the slow-moving crowd. It had been raining, and the asphalt between the rails, and the rails themselves, were wet and shining. The black cobblestones were covered thinly with glossy mud. Even the sidewalks palely mirrored the amazing flame of the lights. It was another Chicago from the city which they had entered with the dawn. Here was a gracious place of warm-looking ways, and a time of leisure, and the people meant other than the people of the morning. The Inger moved among them, swam with them, looked on them all with something new stirring him. Lory went silently. She had slipped her handkerchief cap away, and her hair was bright and uncovered in the lamplight. But she seemed not to be looking anywhere. “You did get on to it there to-night, didn’t you?” he asked, wistfully. “What do you mean?” she said. “Why—the new part,” he told her. “Didn’t you notice? Every last one of ’em was goin’ on about country and folks. _That’s why they want to go._” She was silent, and he was afraid that she did not understand. “I never thought of it till to-night, either,” he excused her. “Don’t you see? Fellows don’t want to go to war just to smash around for a fight. It’s for somethin’ else.” He stopped, vaguely uncomfortable in his exaltation. “It’s killin’,” she said, “an’ killin’ ’s killin’.” He stood still on the walk, regardless of the passers, and shook her arm. “Good heavens,” he said, “women had ought to see that. Women are better’n men, and they’d ought to see it! Can’t you get past the killin’? Can’t you understand they might have a thunderin’ reason?” “_No_ reason don’t matter,” she said. “It’s killin’. And it ain’t anything else.” He walked on, his head bent, his eyes on the ground. She knew that he was disappointed in her—but she was too much shaken to think about that. She remembered how her mother had watched her brother go out to fight after some mean uprising of drunken whites against the Indians. Nobody knew now what it had been about, but six men had been shot. That stayed. Presently the Inger raised his head, and walked with it thrown back again. Women, he supposed, _wouldn’t_ understand. They were afraid—they hated a gun—they hated a scratch. There was the woman with the blue-boned hand and wrist and the pink spangled fan—_she_ understood, it seemed. But somehow that proved nothing, and he freed his thought of her. A window of birds took his fancy. The poor things, trying to sleep in the night light, were tucked uncomfortably about their cages, while their soft breasts and wings attracted to the feather shop possible buyers. The Inger looked at them, thinking. He turned excitedly.