Dick and Ralph were curious about Patsy’s encounter, for they long ago had discovered that Nancy Cowder was one of Sabinsport’s standing subjects of gossip, that the town considered her highly improper. There seemed to be two reasons: one was the general disapproval of anything that belonged to Reuben Cowder, and then the notion that “a girl who raised dogs and horses and took them east, even to England, could not be ‘nice.’”

Dick was much amused when he learned that the Sabinsport skeleton, as Ralph had always called Nancy Cowder, was visiting the Barstows. “She must be all right,” he mused, “or she would not be in that house.” You see, Dick had known Lady Barstow’s brother at Oxford and more than once had passed a week-end with him at his sister’s place.

But Nancy Cowder was quickly forgotten in Patsy’s return. She came a new Patsy, thin and pale, with the energy and the spirit of a Crusader in her blazing eyes. Belgium and her wrongs had been burnt into Patsy’s soul. It was her first great unselfish passion. It had made her tender beyond belief with her father and mother. The two restrained, inexpressive old people were almost embarrassed by the tears and the kisses she showered on them. This was not their business-like, assertive girl, absorbed in her own plans and insisting on her own ways. It was a girl who watched them with almost annoying persistence, who wanted to save them steps, guard them from imaginary danger, give them pleasures they had never even coveted. What they did not realize was that, as Patsy looked into their faces, visions of distracted, homeless Belgian women, of broken, wounded Belgian men, floated before her eyes, that she found relief in doing for them even unnecessary services since she could do nothing for those others.

Patsy’s passion made her hard on the town. She demanded that it champion Belgium’s cause as she had, with all its soul and all its resources; that it think of nothing else. But this it could not do. Sabinsport, ignorant and distant as it was, had developed something of a perspective and was sensing daily something of the complexity of the elements in the war. It could not think singly of Belgium.

Ralph, bitter in spirit at finding Patsy so changed, so absorbed in her conception of her own and her friends’ duty, took her to task for emotionalism. He forced arguments on her: that Germany was the only bulwark between civilization and the Russian peril; that she had been hampered by an envious England; that if Germany had not violated Belgium, France would. If Ralph had not been stung to jealousy by Patsy’s interest in something outside himself he would never have been as stupid and as unreasonable as he proved. He knew he was wrong. He knew that he admired her for the unselfish passion she showed. He knew he hurt her, but he wanted to hurt her!

Patsy—bewildered, shocked, wounded to the heart by Ralph’s talk—promptly forbade him ever to speak to her again and went home and for the first time in her life cried herself to sleep. She had not known how completely she was counting on Ralph’s sympathy. She had said to herself: “Now I know something of what he feels about people who suffer; he’ll know I understand; we can work together.” And here was her dream dissolved. Patsy was learning that war is not the only destroyer of human happiness and hopes.

Ralph charged their quarrel to the war, as he did everything not to his liking. Every day he pounded more emphatically on the wrong of all wars and particularly this war. Every day he preached neutrality, though it must be confessed that he did it all with decreasing faith. It was a hard rôle. He was a man without a text in which he believed to the full. Then suddenly in October he found what he was searching. Reuben Cowder had landed a munition contract. He was to convert a factory made idle by the war and build largely. Ralph was himself again. No self-respecting community should permit money to be made within its limits from war supplies. It was blood money.

CHAPTER III

You might be a town 500 miles from the Atlantic coast and 3500 miles from the fighting line, but, nevertheless, you would have felt, in October of 1914, as Sabinsport did, a very genuine concern about your ability to get through the winter without hunger and cold. The jar of Germany’s first blow at Western Europe was felt in Sabinsport twenty-four hours after it was dealt. When the stock exchanges of the cities closed, credit shut up in every town of the country. The first instinctive thought of every man and woman who had debts to pay or projects to carry out was, “Where will I get the money?” The instant thought of every bank was to protect its funds—no panic—no run—but caution. Sabinsport began to “sit tight” in money matters on August 5th—and she sat tighter every day—and with reason. Orders in her mills and factories were canceled. Men went on half time. The purchasing power of the majority fell off. Men began to figure the chances of the length of the war in order to decide what they as individuals could do until they would be able again to get orders and so have work to offer; when they would be able to get a job and so pay the grocer; when they must stop credit to the retail buyer because the wholesaler had cut off their credit—these were the thoughts that occupied the mind of Sabinsport much more generally than the European war and its causes. There was a strong feeling that it would be a short war—another 1870—take Paris and the business would be over, Sabinsport believed; and, though there was real satisfaction over the turning back of the Germans at the Marne, there was a sigh, for they knew the anxiety they felt was to continue and increase.

“You see,” Ralph said to Dick, “they’re only concerned about themselves and what the war will do to them.”