“What would you expect to happen, Lori, in a war in which every man in both armies wore an amulet? If the bullets were flying on both sides, would they retire back into the clouds and do no harm?”
“I do not understand you. You are so lukewarm in faith. Your Aunt Mary often laments about it to me.”
“Why do you not answer my question?”
“Because it involves a sneer at a thing which to me is sacred.”
“Sneer; oh, no! only a reasonable reflection.”
“But you must know that it is a sin to entrust your own reason with the power of judging in things which are above us.”
“Well, I have done, Lori. You may be right. Reflection and research are of no use. For sometime all kinds of doubts have risen within me about my most ancient convictions, and I find only pain from them. If I were to lose the conviction that it was a necessity and a good thing to begin this war, I should never be able to forgive him who——”
“You mean Louis Napoleon. What an intriguer he is!”
“Whether he or another, I should like to remain in the undisturbed belief that there are no men at all who have caused the war, but that it ‘broke out’ of itself—broke out, like a nervous fever, like the eruption of Vesuvius.”
“How excited you get, my love. But let us speak reasonably; so listen to me. In a short time the war will be over and our husbands will come back captains. I will then try to get mine to obtain four or six weeks’ leave, and take a trip with me to a watering-place. It will do him good after all the fatigues he will have undergone; and me also, after the heat, and the ennui, and the anxiety I have undergone. For you must not think that I have no fear at all. It may be God’s will after all that one of my dear ones should meet with a soldier’s death—and even though it is a noble, enviable death, on the field of honour, for emperor and fatherland——”