"There's another reason, too," she said. "I should go off my head if I wasn't busy about something. I wish there was such a thing as a clinical thermometer of unhappiness, and you would see how utterly miserable I am. You can't guess what being at war with Germany means to me. All that is best in the world to me comes from Germany; all music comes from there. And yet last night when I was playing a bit of Brahms, Bertie said, 'Oh, do stop that damned Hun tune!' Why, there's no such thing as a Hun tune! Music is simply music, and with a few exceptions the Huns, as he loves to call them, have made it all."
"He calls them Huns," said Dodo carefully, "because they've already proved themselves the most infamous barbarians. Did you see the fresh atrocities in the Times this morning?"
"I did, and I blushed for the wickedness of the people who invented them and the credulity of the people who believed them. They can't be true. I know the Germans, and they are incapable of that sort of thing. I bet you that every German paper is full of similar atrocities committed by the English."
"Then you'll have to blush for the wickedness and the credulity of the Germans too, darling!" remarked Dodo. "You will be red."
Edith laughed.
"Yes, I'm sorry I said that," she said. "But in any case what has Brahms got to do with it? How can any sane person develop racial hatred like that? Let's have a pogrom of Jews because of Judas Iscariot. To go back. I'm not sent into the world to empty slops, but to make symphonies. Very few people can make symphonies, and I'm one of them. Huns or no Huns, what have artists to do with war?"
"But, my dear, you can't help having to do with it," said Dodo. "You might as well say, 'What have artists to do with earthquakes'?' But an earthquake will shake down an artist's house just as merrily as a commercial traveller's. You can't be English, and not have to do with war."
Edith was silent a moment, and suddenly her face began to tie itself into the most extraordinary knots.
"Give me some port or I shall cry," she said. "I won't cry; I never do cry and I'm not going to begin now."
The prescription seemed to be efficacious.