Suddenly she stopped, and came a couple of steps nearer him.
“Michael, it isn’t possible that you believe those things of us?” she said.
He got up.
“Ah, do leave it alone, Sylvia,” he said. “I know no more of the truth or falsity of it than you. I have seen just what you have seen in the papers.”
“You don’t feel the impossibility of it, then?” she asked.
“No, I don’t. There seems to have been sworn testimony. War is a cruel thing; I hate it as much as you. When men are maddened with war, you can’t tell what they would do. They are not the Germans you know, nor the Germans I know, who did such things—not the people I saw when I was with Hermann in Baireuth and Munich a year ago. They are no more the same than a drunken man is the same as that man when he is sober. They are two different people; drink has made them different. And war has done the same for Germany.”
He held out his hand to her. She moved a step back from him.
“Then you think, I suppose, that Hermann may be concerned in those atrocities,” she said.
Michael looked at her in amazement.
“You are talking sheer nonsense, Sylvia,” he said.