"What is your reason?" snapped Mrs. Payson. But an honest curiosity lighted her eye.
"The same thing strikes us funny at the same time. We like the same kind of book though we may disagree about it. We like to be outdoors a lot, and we understand each other's language and we're not sentimental and we don't snarl if food is delayed and we don't demand explanations, and any one of those reasons would make marriage between two people a reasonably safe bet."
Mrs. Payson forced herself to a tremendous effort. "You haven't even said you're——" she gulped—"you're——" with a rush—"in love with him."
"I haven't said anything else."
But next June, when she was twenty, Charley was saying, "But a man who won't fight——!"
"I haven't said I won't fight. I said I wouldn't enlist, and I won't. I hate war. It's against every principle I've got. If I'm drafted I'll go into the damn thing as a private and if I find that shooting a gun or jabbing a bayonet into another fellow's guts is going to stop his doing the same to me I'll shoot and jab. I don't pretend to be fired with the martial spirit simply because a European nation, grown too big for its clothes, tried to grab off a new lot and failed in the first attempt."
"I believe you're afraid."
"Of course I'm afraid. Any man who says he isn't lies. I hate living in filth and mud and lice and getting an eye shot out. But that isn't my reason for not going, and you know it. I won't voluntarily further this thing."
Charley did know it. She knew, too, that the instinct that made her want to send her man to war was a thing of low derivation yet terribly human. She did not say, definitely. "I can't marry a man who feels as you do." It was the first time in her life that she had lacked the courage to say definitely the thing she thought. But the family realised that the June wedding was no longer a thing to be combated. June came and went. The Hyde Park Boulevard apartment had not known the young poet for a month.