The girl was silent for a moment, then she answered:
"They stood up for what was a matter of honor. They made a fight against odds. They could have sold out easy enough."
"Well, I don't know," said the man, stretching his arms and yawning.
"No, that's just the trouble with men like you. You don't know, and you don't care to know. You're all alike; you stand aloof or amused. A great human wrong has taken place, and you say, 'Well, I don't know!'"
"Just a moment," interrupted the man.
"But I haven't finished," went on the girl; "there's another thing I want to say. When Belgium made her fight, she suffered horrible things. Her women and children were mutilated on system, as part of a cold policy. Cruelty to the unoffending, that is what I mean by atrocities."
"I don't believe you," retorted the man.
"Come and see."
Hilda, who had run across from Ghent to London to stock up on supplies for the Corps, was talking with John Hinchcliffe, American banker, broker, financier. He was an old-time friend of Hilda's family—a young widower, in that successful period of early middle-age when the hard work and the dirty work have availed and the momentum of the career maintains itself. In the prematurely gray hair, the good-looking face, the abrupt speech, he was very much American. He was neat—neat in his way of dressing, and in his compact phrases, as hard and well-rounded as a pebble. The world to him was a place full of slackers, of lazy good-nature, of inefficiency. Into that softness he had come with a high explosive and an aim. He moved through life as a hunter among a covey of tame partridges—a brief flutter and a tumble of soft flesh. He had the cunning lines about the mouth, the glint in the eye, of the successful man. He had the easy generosities, too, of the man who, possessing much, can express power by endowing helpless things which he happens to like. There was an abundant sentiment in him, sentiment about his daughter and his flag, and the economic glory of his times. He was rather proud of that soft spot in his make-up. When men spoke of him as hard, he smiled to himself, for there in his consciousness was that streak of emotional richness. If he were attacked for raiding a trolley system, he felt that his intimates would declare, "You don't know him. Why John is a King."