"Wait a little. All we want is to get used to War: it's a new experience for all of us——"
She laughed sharply—
"It's ludicrous, but really you'd think if you studied my family that I was responsible for the whole thing. It's positively as though I'd made some huge blunder which they would do their best to excuse. Adela, John—I'm now to them an old sick woman who's got to be kept quiet and away from worry. They wouldn't have dared let me see that six months ago—"
Her voice was trembling.
She went on again, more quietly. "Every hour now one hears some horrible thing. This morning that young Dick Staveling dead, shot in some skirmish or another—Fine boy he was. They're all going out, one after the other—Not useless idiots who aren't wanted here like John or Vincent—but boys, boys like—like Roddy."
Again her voice trembled.
For the first time in his knowledge of her some pity for her stirred in him, for the first time in her knowledge of him she definitely looked to him with some appeal.
"Roddy came to see me yesterday," she said.
"Yes?" said Christopher.
"He had not been so often as he used—I told him so; he made some feeble apology, but I can see that he will not come again so often——"