That evening, over the supper-table, he repeated to his wife what his stenographer had said. His wife asked, "That little sallow Miss Boardman that never has a word to say for herself?" and upon being told that it was the same, said wonderingly, "Well, what ever started her up, I wonder?" After a time she said: "Is Germany so much bigger than Belgium as all that? Pete, go get your geography." She and her husband and their High School son gazed at the map. "It looks that way," said the father. "Gee! They must have had their nerve with them! Gimme the paper." He read with care the war-news and the editorial which he had skipped in the morning, and as he read he looked very grave, and rather cross. When he laid the paper down he said, impatiently: "Oh, damn the war! Damn Europe, anyhow!" His wife took the paper out of his hand and read in her turn the news of the advance into Northern France.
Just before they fell asleep his wife remarked out of the darkness, "Mr. Scheidemann, down at the grocery, said to-day the war was because the other nations were jealous of Germany."
"Well, I don't know," said Mr. Pennypacker heavily, "that I'd have any call to take an ax to a man because I thought he was jealous of me."
"That's so," admitted his wife.
During that autumn Ellen read the papers, and from time to time broke her silence and unburdened her mind to the people in the boarding-house. They considered her unbalanced on the subject. The young reporter on the Marshallton Herald liked to lead her on to "get her going," as he said—but the others dodged whenever the war was mentioned and looked apprehensively in her direction.
The law of association of ideas works, naturally enough, in Marshallton, Kansas, quite as much at its ease as in any psychological laboratory. In fact Marshallton was a psychological laboratory with Ellen Boardman, an undefined element of transmutation. Without knowing why, scarcely realizing that the little drab figure had crossed his field of vision, Mr. Pennypacker found the war recurring to his thoughts every time he saw her. He did not at all enjoy this, and each time that it happened he thrust the disagreeable subject out of his mind with impatience. The constant recurrence of the necessity for this effort brought upon his usually alert, good-humored face an occasional clouded expression like that which darkened his stenographer's eyes. When Ellen came into the dining-room of the boarding-house, even though she did not say a word, every one there was aware of an unpleasant interruption to the habitual, pleasant current of their thoughts directed upon their own affairs. In self-defense some of the women took to knitting polo-caps for Belgian children. With those in their hands they could listen, with more reassuring certainty that she was "queer," to Miss Boardman's comments on what she read in the newspaper. Every time Mr. Wentworth, preaching one of his excellent, civic-minded sermons on caring for the babies of the poor, or organizing a playground for the children of the factory workers, or extending the work of the Ladies' Guild to neighborhood visits, caught sight of that plain, very serious face looking up at him searchingly, expectantly, he wondered if he had been right in announcing that he would not speak on the war because it would certainly cause dissension among his congregation.
One day, in the middle of winter, he found Miss Boardman waiting for him in the church vestibule after every one else had gone. She said, with her usual directness: "Mr. Wentworth, do you think the French ought to have just let the Germans walk right in and take Paris? Would you let them walk right in and take Washington?"
The minister was a young man, with a good deal of natural heat in his composition, and he found himself answering this bald question with a simplicity as bald: "No, I wouldn't."
"Well, if they did right, why don't we help them?" Ellen's homely, monosyllabic words had a ring of despairing sincerity.