"Ain't you no sense of what'd due to occasions?" says she, regal. "Yes," says Mis' Toplady, "I have. I guess that's just what's the matter of me. It's the occasion that ails me. I was thinking--well, Ladies, I was wondering just how much like singing we'd feel if we'd _seen_ Jeffro's arm shot off him." "But we _didn't_ see it," says Mis' Sykes, final. That's the way she argues. "Mebbe I'm all wrong," says Mis' Toplady, "but, Ladies, I can't feel like a man getting all shot up is an occasion for jollification. I can't do it." Us ladies all kind of breathed deep, like a vent had been opened. "Nor me." "Nor me." "Nor me." Run 'round Mis' Sykes's setting-room, from one to one. I wish't you could have seen Mis' Sykes. She looked like we'd declared for cannibalism and atheism and traitorism, all rolled into one. "Ain't you ladies," she says, "no sense of the glories of war? Or what?" "Or what," says Mis' Toplady. "That's just it--glories of what. I guess it's the _what_ part that I sense the strongest, somehow." Mis' Sykes laid down her paper, and crossed her hands--with the cameo ring under, and then remembered and crossed it _over_--and she says: "Ladies, facts is facts. You've got to take things as they are." Abigail Arnold flashed in. "But you ain't takin' 'em nowheres," she says. "You're leavin' 'em as they are. War is the way it's been for five thousand years--only five thousand times worse." Mis' Sykes tapped her foot, and made her lips both thin and straight. "Yes," she says, "and it always will be. As long as the world lasts, there'll be war." Then I couldn't stand it any longer. I looked her right square in the face, and I says: "Mis' Sykes. Do you believe that?" "Certainly I believe it," she says. "Besides, there's nothing in the Bible against war. Not a thing." "What about 'Thou shalt not kill'?" says I. She froze me--she fair froze me. "That," she said, "is an entirely different matter." "Well," says I, "if you'll excuse me for saying so, it ain't different. But leave that go. What about 'Love thy neighbor'? What about the brotherhood of man? What about--" She sighed, real patient. "Your mind works so queer sometimes, Calliope," she says. "Yes, well, mebbe," I says, like I'd said to her before. "But anyhow, it works. It don't just set and set and set, and never hatch nothing. This whole earth has set on war since the beginning, and hatched nothing but death. Do you think, honest, that we haven't no more invention to us than to keep on a-bungling like this to the end of time?" Mis' Sykes stomped her foot. "Look-a-here," she says. "Do you want to arrange something to go down to welcome Jeffro home, or don't you? If you don't, say so." Mis' Toplady sighed. "Let's us go down to meet him," she says. "Leave us do that. But don't you expect no singing off me," says she, final. "That's all."