“I’m rather tired. I think I must go to my cabin and have a rest.” She added, however, not very coherently: “The way things happen is in general the best way—if we know how to use it.” Somewhat desperately, because of her determination to go, I burst out, “And do you think all this has been the best way?” “You must see for yourself that it’s been a very good way. We’ve been able to do—to do the things we’ve both done.” But the admission in the use of the first personal plural pronoun seemed suddenly to alarm her. She took refuge again in her need of rest. “I really must be off. If we don’t meet again before we leave the boat—” “Oh, but we shall!” “I’m very often confined to my cabin.” “Not when you want to be out of it.” “Very well, then; I very often don’t leave my cabin.” I was holding the hand she had extended to say good-by, but she slipped it away and was going. “Then tell me this—just this,” I begged. “How is it that we’re both on the same ship? That didn’t happen by accident?” Whether she refused to answer my question or whether it didn’t reach her I couldn’t tell. All I got in response was a long, oblique regard—the fleeing farewell look of Beatrice Cenci—as she carried her secrets and mysteries away with her. _CHAPTER XXI_ So my celibacy of the will was threatened. I mean by that that I found myself with two main objects of thought instead of one. Having vowed myself to a cause, a woman had supervened with that pervasiveness of presence with which a perfume fills a room. I might still vow myself to the cause, but I shouldn’t serve it as I had meant to, with heart and senses free. Or should I? The question fundamentally was that. Could I at a time like this divide my allegiance as I should be obliged to divide it by falling in love and being married? Or ought I, in deference to the work I was to do, suppress this old passion and smother the problems and curiosities it had begun to rouse in me? If, in view of the many men who have been good soldiers and equally good husbands, this hesitation seems far-fetched to you, I must beg you to remember what I have told you already, that my mission, such as it was, had become my life. For this the inspiration sprang from what I had seen for myself. What I had seen for myself compelled me to believe that the world was divided into just two camps—those who fought the Germans and those who did not. “He that is not with me is against me,” I was prepared to say; except that for the small bordering nations, whom the arch-enemy could have crushed as he had crushed Belgium and Serbia before any one else could save them, I was ready to make long allowances. I couldn’t make these allowances for the United States; and to win the friends I valued so highly to joining in the task that seemed to me the most pressing before mankind was the work to which I longed to give myself every minute of the day.