“Well,” said her husband pleasantly, “it was a good deal of a bore to go through all that training and then never have a chance to use it.”
“Oh, it’ll come in handy for the next war,” Stacey observed.
“Oh, Stacey!” his sister cried, “you don’t think there’s going to be another!”
Stacey laughed. “I was only trying to comfort you, Julie. Thought from the way you spoke you’d like to give Jimmy a chance. Just think of it!—there he’d be on a big white horse, waving his sword and charging the enemy, with all his men following him and cheering madly! Wouldn’t you like that?”
Jimmy grinned at his brother-in-law, but Julie shook her head soberly, though perhaps she was only playing at being as ingenuous as all that.
“No,” she said firmly, “I wouldn’t. Jimmy plays a good game of golf, but he’s no use at all on a horse—never was. And I think it would be nice enough—now—for him to have got across and have had a medal, like you, Stacey dear, so that I could say: ‘I don’t think you’ve met my husband, Mrs. Jones. You see, he’s been in France for two years. Oh, yes, D. S. C., of course!’—but at the time I never did want him to go, not for a minute.”
The two young men laughed again. Stacey considered his sister’s point of view human, straightforward and sensible. Where was the good, he wondered swiftly, in going through a lot of complicated emotions, since, if you were honest, you always ended in just such simplicity? It was a lot better to be simple in the first place and stay so.
But Mr. Carroll, who was in the midst of a swallow of claret, gulped suddenly, choked, and set his glass down with a bump. “That,” he said angrily, “is about as silly and weak and unpatriotic as anything I’ve ever heard even you say, Julie!”
“I can’t help it, dad,” Julie returned meekly. “It’s the way I really feel.”
“Then you should keep still about it. Nice sort of part we should have played in the war if every wife had taken that attitude!”