And now, after these two years of quarreling, how changed Patsy was from the Patsy of Mary Sabins' dinner! What a transformation from the calculating, self-sufficient Patsy he had known--this passionate, self-forgetful champion of a sorrowing people! It had only needed contact with sorrow to break down every hard strain in her, to drive from her mind every thought of pleasure and profit. It was the weak and broken men and women of that over-run land that filled her heart. And how lovely she had grown under pity and labor for others. He had stepped into a church one night, the first winter of the war, where she was telling the story of Belgium. He had done it in spite of himself, he recalled. And he could see her now, her face flushed, her eyes big and dark with pity, her hands suddenly and unconsciously pressed to her bosom as she rehearsed the story of a lost child--one she had found wandering in the streets of Brussels--a refugee child of whom no one knew the name--too little to know it himself, but not too little to cry, "Mamma! Mamma!" He remembered how it had gripped him and how he had resented his emotion--how his pity had turned to rage that she should be giving her strength to these distant orphans when, as he told himself in jealous exaggeration, "America's full of them." Oh, he had been a fool. It was as Dick said, he had no feeling for any orphans but those which were included in his scheme, no sense of any wrongs but those which he had set out to right. What a drop was all the misery in America to the bottomless well of misery in Europe! And what a difference in trying to do away with misery in a land of peace and in one of war! What was all that he had been interested in beside the ghastly wrongs that Patsy agonized over! Was he never to see her again? Did she mean her last heated declaration? Could he make it up? When a young man of Ralph Gardner's sure and lordly spirit eats his rare humble pie, he usually leaves no crumbs. He humiliates himself to the ground. Ralph was ready to do this now. He would write a letter, exposing his egotism, his self-centered narrowness. He would tell her why he was so unreasonable, so boorish. He wanted his own way in the world and resented a war that blocked it. He wouldn't see a noble reason for the war because the war interfered with his noble reason--Ralph Gardner's scheme of social regeneration. He wouldn't spare himself, he would outdo Dick's arraignment. He would lay all his jealousy and resentment at her feet, and then ask if she could be his friend again.