He recalled, too--recalled it with the German White Book on his knee--how, before the winter was over, his resentment at Patsy's aplomb had passed. He had learned to match her lively reports of personal adventures in her school with as lively ones of what was going on in Sabinsport's streets and factories. If she talked school reform, he talked labor reform; if she urged improved laboratories, he urged social insurance. They often accused each other of not understanding the importance of their respective tasks and they as often gibed at each other for taking these tasks over-seriously. He remembered that he missed her when she went away for the summer and greeted her gladly when she came back. Patsy had been nice to him that second winter. She had guests from the East in the fall--"real swells"--people whose names appeared in the New York society column, and he had said to himself, "She's certainly a corker," when he saw with what genuine hospitality and with what entire absence of pretension Patsy had entertained her friends in the ample farm house, giving them all the gay country fall pleasures, quite to the horror of High Town, who would have loved to have opened its really luxurious houses and set out its really lovely china. Patsy had taken Dick and himself as her major-domos in her festivities and had thanked him warmly. "Nobody could have been nicer or more generous than you and Dick were. I knew I could count on you. It isn't so easy, you know, to keep people whose business in life is largely amusement--though they don't know it--amused every moment in a simple establishment like ours. But they really were happy, and it was largely due to you." It had set him up wonderfully. But, after all, he hadn't seen much of Patsy that second winter. There was the _Argus_ and the growing printing business which he was determined should be strong enough to support any fight he would make, no matter how costly in advertising and circulation; there had been the perplexity about how and where to attack next the duo of rascals, as he believed them, Mulligan and Cowder, whom he had beaten once, but whom he feared it was not going to be so easy to beat again. Patsy had not understood his zeal. She had been frankly disapproving. "Why set the town by the ears again, Ralph? It makes everybody unhappy, and I don't see how your old reform victory has improved things. Of course the franchises ought to be in the hands of the town, but you must confess we get good service and not so costly. Wait awhile." He had been very sore over that. He had made up his mind she was merely an attractive, friendly, calculating young woman. That was the way he felt about her when she went abroad in June of 1914, he told himself, as he idly fingered Cramb's little volume, which he really should have been seriously reading, if he was to understand Germany.