“Look at the waves where the sun catches them. Aren’t they like flashing steel? It’s just as if all the drowned hands at the bottom of the sea were holding up swords to the people of America, begging them to go and fight.” I looked at her, startled. “You feel that way?” She looked at me, indignant. “Certainly. How else could I feel?” “Oh, I didn’t know. Americans feel so many different ways.” “Because they don’t know. I’m going back”—she gave a light, deprecating laugh—“I’m going back to tell them.” I was still more startled. “Tell whom?” “Any one I know. Every one knows some one. I don’t mean to say that I’m a Joan of Arc; but I shall do what I can.” “And how shall you begin?” “I’ll begin with father and with—” She stopped at the second name, though to me the fact did not become significant till afterward. “That’s what I meant,” she resumed, “when I said I was going back on his account.” “You mean?” “He doesn’t see why we should be in it. He’s like so many Americans; he hasn’t emerged from the eighteen-hundreds. He still thinks of the New World as if it was a new creation that had nothing to do with the Old. He doesn’t see that there’s only one world and one race of men, wherever they are and whatever they do. To him Americans are like souls that get over to paradise. They’re safe and can afford to dwell safely. They’re no longer concerned with the sorrows and struggles of the people left on earth.” It was to get light on my own way that I asked, “And what are you going to say to convince him?” “I don’t know yet. I shall say what the moment suggests.” “And you’re sure it will suggest something?” Her great eyes burned like coals as she turned them on me in protest at the question. “Suggest something? You might as well ask if the air suggests something. It suggests that I breathe it; but I don’t have to think of it beforehand, when the whole world is full of it.” “Full of what?” She considered the question, finding in it all I meant to put there. “I don’t know,” she answered at last. “That is, I don’t know in any sense that would go into a few words. There’s so much of it. The minute you try to express it from any one point of view you find you’re inadequate.” I was still seeking light. “But when you try to do it from several points of view—correlating them?” “Even then—” She paused, reflecting, shaking her head as she went on again, as if to shake away a consciousness of the impossible. “I don’t try. There’s no use in trying. It’s so immense—so far beyond me. It’s grown so, too. When it first began I could more or less compass it—or, I thought I could. Now it’s become like nature—or God—or any of the colossal infinite conceptions—it means different things to different minds.” “That is, we can only take of it what we take of the ocean—each a few drops—no one able to take all?”