"You don't know what you're talking about," Greta said harshly. "The best brains in Europe are at this work. Ask your friends of the British secret service."
"There's a difference between the secret service and spying."
"Oh, is there! Then it would take a Jesuit to find out and a fool to believe. We are all in the same business. Only the other nations play at it, and we work. No questions with us, no limits. You others, yes, all of you,"—she flung it out,—"you paddle. We? We're up to the eyes!" Her own, marred and mud-stained, were lifted to the opposite wall. "We're over the eyes!" she triumphed. "We hold our breath down there under the surface till we crack our lungs. And smug people judge us! People who have never done even a safe thing to serve their country—they judge us—who face death hour by hour!"
"You don't, Greta, anyway." Nan Ellis had her pride, as it seemed, though its roots were deeper than nationality. "Lucky for you, you're in England!"
"England!" Her face as she turned it away was hideous with hatred.
Nan stood up. "Though you refuse to be, I at least can be glad that in England they don't—"
"Oh, don't they!" She clutched at the edge of the table and leaned across it. "I'll tell you what the English don't do. They don't talk about what they do." As Nan opened her lips, the other raised her voice to the level of a hoarse scream. "But there's a thing they don't understand—your friends the English. They imagine they can wear us out. Hein?" Again she addressed an invisible audience, still believing, as Nan thought, that she was under the ceaseless observation that had turned her wits. "These English! They think they can force a German woman to sell her friends, to give away her country! A German! I tell you"—she staggered to her feet—"these devils can go on as long as ever they like. I don't know why they stopped—"
"Stopped? Stopped what?"
"Torturing me," she said, gutturaling the r's till they sounded like the tearing of a fabric. "'Who is my friend in the War Office?'" The words acted on her swifter than poison, more like the twist of a knife in a wound. She opened her mouth and gasped for air. When it came she cast it back in a cry that wasn't human.
Nan shrank against the wall. A bell clanged.