No; nothing in them but surmise—suspense—theories—they walked on, passing Miss Armitage from the Club who had paused on the kerb to talk to one of her friends, a long-haired man in a broad-leafed brown hat. He seemed to be dispensing pamphlets to people in the street. As Miss Armitage smiled and nodded good-bye to him the two other girls came up. He of the locks slipped a pamphlet into the hand of Leslie Long.
She glanced at it, stopped, and looked at it again. It was headed:
"BRITAIN, STAND ASIDE!"
Leslie stood for a moment and regarded this male. She said very gently, "You don't want any War?"
The long-haired person in the gutter gave a shrug and a little superior smile. "Oh, well, that's assumed, isn't it?" he said. "We don't want any War."
"Or any country, I suppose?" said Leslie, walking on. She held the pamphlet a little gingerly between her finger and thumb. She had thought of tossing it into the gutter—but no. She kept it as a curiosity.
Late that night she sat on Gwenna Williams' bed at the Club, suspense eating at her heart. For all the soldier blood in her had taken her back to old times in barracks, or in shabby lodging-houses in garrison towns, or on echoing, sunny parade-grounds.... Times before she had drifted into the gay fringes of the cosmopolitan jungle of Bohemian life in London. Before the Hospital, the Art-school, the daily "job," with her evenings for the theatre and the Crab-tree Club, and the dances she loved. It is the first ten years of a child's life that are said to "count." They counted now. The twenty-six-year-old Leslie, whose childhood had been passed within sound of the bugle-call, waited, waited, waited to know if the ideas of honour and country and glory which she had taken in unconsciously in those far-off times were now to be tossed down into the gutter as she would have tossed the leaflet of that coward. These things, as Miss Armitage and her friends could have told her, were mere sentimentalities—names—ideas. Yet what has ever proved stronger than an Idea?
"Oh, Taffy!" she sighed impatiently. "If we're told that we're to sit still and nothing will happen?"
And little Gwenna, lying curled up with a hand in her chum's, murmured again, "That's not what's coming."