He was in time to find room on the steps and then within the rotunda. He stared about him. This looked different from all other buildings that he had seen—as if great things were due to happen here. He pressed on slowly, as the others pressed. Eventually the elevators received them, and he found himself in an enormous room, the seats of the floor already filled, the galleries fast filling. He stood against the wall and looked. Below and above a throng of women, and only here and there a man. It occurred to him at last that he did not belong here, but now he could not well retreat, for the crowd blocked the doors. On the platform were a dozen women. He looked at them curiously. He was familiar with but one sort of woman who was willing to show herself before a crowd. There flashed to his mind the memory of the dozen women whom he had seen on the stage of the Mission Saloon in Inch, on what was to have been Bunchy’s wedding night. Dress them like this, he reflected—dark and plain—and they wouldn’t look so different, at this distance. The silence disturbed him. What on earth made them so still—as if it were a matter of life and death, whatever they were meeting about. He waited in absorbing curiosity to hear what it was they were going to say. “Somebody says the Senate’s full, too,” he heard a man tell some one. “And they’re going to speak in the rotunda and on the steps.” The Inger turned to him. “What’s this room?” he asked. “This is the House,” the man replied, courteously. The Inger looked with new eyes. The House ... where his laws were made. He felt a sudden surprised sense of pride in the room. The silence became a hush, contagious, electric, and he saw that a woman on the platform had risen. She stood hatless, her hair brushed smoothly back, and her hands behind her. Abruptly he liked her. And he wondered what his mother had looked like. There was no applause, but to his amazement the whole audience rose, and stood for a moment, in absolute silence. This woman spoke simply, and as if she were talking to each one there. It astonished the man. He had heard no one address a meeting save in campaign speeches, and this was not like those. “The fine moral reaction,” she said, “has at last come. It has come in a remorse too tardy to reclaim all the human life that has been spent. It has come in a remorse too tardy to reclaim the treasure that has been wasted. But it comes too with a sense of joy that all voluntary destruction of human life, all the deliberate wasting of the fruits of labor, will soon have become things of the past. Whatever the future holds for us, it will at least be free from war.”[1] Of this the Inger understood nothing. What could she be talking about, when the United States was to go to war at once?