Joan’s face hardened. “Po’try,” she said. She took a sharpened pencil from the glass tray upon her writing-table and regarded it. The pencil was finely pointed—too finely pointed. She broke off the top with the utmost care and tested the blunt point on her blotting-paper to see if it was broad enough for her purpose. Then she scrawled her reply across his letter—in five words: “You ought to enlist. Joan,” and addressed an envelope obliquely in the same uncivil script.
After which she selected sundry other letters and a snap-shot giving a not unfavourable view of Huntley from her desk, and having scrutinized the latter for an interval, tore them all carefully into little bits and dropped them into her wastepaper basket. She stood regarding these fragments for some time. “I might have gone to him,” she whispered at last, and turned away.
She blew out her candle, hesitated by her bedside, and walked to the open window to watch the moon rise.
She sat upon her window-sill like a Joan of marble for a long time. Then she produced one of those dark sayings with which she was wont to wrap rather than express her profounder thoughts.
“Queer how suddenly one discovers at last what one has known all along.... Queer....
“Well, I know anyhow.”...
She stood up at last and yawned. “But I don’t like war,” said Joan. “Stretchers! Or lying about! Groaning. In the darkness. Boys one has danced with. Oh! beastly. Beastly!”
She forgot her intention of undressing, put her foot on the sill, and rested chin on fist and elbow on knee, scowling out at the garden as though she saw things that she did not like there.
§ 4
So it was that Joan saw the beginning of the great winnowing of mankind, and Peter came home in search of his duty.