"Germany beaten! You must be mad."
The steward's face had grown red; his anger was mounting still.
"I get it straight," he said. "Dere vas a great battle. De English and French have beat de Zhermans."
"It is a lie!"
"How do you know that?" asked the calm voice of Newcomb at Greta's side.
"How does one know anything? You wouldn't expect me to consider the possibility of such a thing just because"—her contempt followed the steward for those first yards of his progress toward the side table—"because that sort of creature says so?" She looked round for understanding. Something in the averted eyes of the company nettled her. "He says it, armer Wurm," she went on with her head high, "from the same motives that make others long to believe it. Jealousy."
"Do we understand you to say," Newcomb asked, "that you wouldn't believe news, however authentic, of a German defeat?"
"There couldn't be authentic news of a German defeat. If it came from some one I knew and trusted, if all the people I know and trust combined to say there had been a German defeat, I should know they were wrong."
While she waited for the hors d'œuvres, her handsome shoulders thrown back, her chin high, she pronounced a pæan to Kultur cum militarism. Newcomb construed it as a letting off pent-up steam, a vent for anger against Miss Ellis and against the gathering cloud of enemies. But it was also something more. It had in it an element of fanaticism, mixed with balked passion for force. A reckless joy in the doctrine of stick-at-nothing to serve the end. With such an accent we have heard some one very old, or very young and weak saying, "We bombed them out of the wood," or, "We took Hill 60." It is a singular thing in psychology and yet to be explored, this passion on the part of the physically weaker for those very brute forces in the universe which, but for their opposites, would be the sure undoing of all but the physically strongest, and, in the end, of them as well.
In the midst of her hymn to pro-Teutonism, Ashmole came in, looking more idiotic than usual, staring about out of his big glasses as though he couldn't recognize the table.