“You spoke about the Kaiser’s order to us about how to paint our ships, as if the insult of that was what at last brought us in! How little that had to do with it for us! It merely happened to come at the time we could at last go in—when a hundred million people, not in danger which they could see or feel, decided to go in, knowing even better than those who had decided earlier what it was going to mean. For the war was different then from what it was at first; the Russia of the Czar and of the empire was gone; and in France and in England there was a difference, too. Oh, I don’t know how to say it; just France, at first, was fighting as France and for France against Germany; and England, for England, was doing the same. And America couldn’t do that—I mean fight for America; she couldn’t join with allies who were fighting for themselves or even for one another. The side of the allies had to become more than that before we could go in; and it is and we’re in! Oh, I don’t know how or when it will appear; but I know—know that before long you will be prouder to be an American than you ever dreamed you could be if we had gone in like the others when you thought we should.”
She had been gazing at him and, for a few moments, he had been staring in bewilderment at her; but now he was turned away and she could see from the set of his lips, from the pulse throbbing below his temple as the muscles of his face pulled taut, how she had offended him.
“Thank you,” he said to her shortly.
“I’ve hurt you!”
“Didn’t you mean to?”
“Not this way.”
“You told what you thought; I asked to know it. How do you happen to be here, Miss Gail?” he asked with sudden directness after a pause.
Ruth recollected swiftly Cynthia Gail’s connections through Hubert Lennon’s aunt with Mrs. Corliss and she related them to Gerry Hull, perforce; and this unavoidable deception distressed her more than all the previous ones she had played. She realized that, in order to understand what she had said, he was trying to understand her; and she wished that she could tell him that she was Ruth Alden, working, only as late as that morning, in Hilton Brothers’ office.
“You’re not like anyone else here,” he said, without pressing his inquiry further. “Hub Lennon told me that he had a different sort of girl with him. These other people are all like myself; you saw the way they took what I said. They didn’t take it as said against them; they’ve been in the war, heart and soul, since the first. You’ve only come in when we—I mean America,” he corrected with a wince, “came in. I think I felt that without knowing it; that’s why I talked to you more than to all the rest together. That’s why I needed to see you again; you’re more of an American, I guess, than anyone else here.”
He said that with a touch of bitterness which prevented her offering reply.