"I am sorry my brains inspire you with such distrust."
"Perhaps it's my own I'm shaky about. But I don't believe any brain can keep steady under some stories. No; mustn't think about them."
"She gets that from Grant," Newcomb decided. He looked across the table. Next the captain's empty place, sat the only person in the saloon unmoved, you would say, by the news—a British naval officer, grave, monosyllabic, and showing just that same face throughout the voyage. Not so much as a hint about his errand to the States and little enough about anything else. Until the fourth night out he had slept or dozed over a book. The only five minutes during which he had appeared really awake had been when some one in the smoking-room repeated Julian Grant's asseveration that the German atrocity stories were "faked." "Every nation tells of its enemy. Only the ignorant and unthinking are taken in."
It was then that the officer dozing in the corner lifted that face of his, with its hard, fine outline like a profile on an old coin, and came to life. The indifference cleared out of his eyes as low-hung, slumbering smoke will clear before the blast.
"If to be taken in by 'faked' stories was all that the innocent had to fear!" In cold accents he told about a Belgian girl. Daughter of an officer in the Belgian Army, a man he knew. When the Germans took Antwerp she was carried off. Fell into the hands of a U-boat captain. When he'd done with her, handed her over to his crew. She didn't die quickly enough. They threw her overboard. "An officer's daughter!" he repeated, as though that were the culminating point of the horror.
Some one repeated the story to Julian. His anger was a thing no one would forget. Believe it? Such stories were told for a purpose. It was "the kind of poison that infects people's wits and loses them their souls. Makes brute beasts out of humans. There are minds that batten on such lies. They get decent people to listen in the fevered, abnormal state all nerves are in nowadays. Foulness that would be choked back down their obscene throats at other times, it's listened to like some message out of Sinai or Olympus. I tell you the German U-boat captains are as good men as ever the hag War breeds. They must be men of character. You daren't give a job like that to a drunken, rotten roué."
Here was Miss Greta at last, never so late before and never so resplendent. Silver sequins and black lace for that last night.
"I'm glad"—she spoke to a lady across the table—"glad to see you've emancipated yourself."
"Emancipated—how?" Lady Neave asked.
"You've broken the tyranny of the Gieve jacket."