“Does Patsy know I’m coming?” Ralph asked anxiously.
“She does, and she consents.”
“I wonder why,” reflected Ralph.
“How should I know the vagaries of Patsy’s mind?” the parson replied.
It was funny, Dick told himself after it was over, the formal good behavior of the two, the conscious restraint that said louder than words throughout dinner, “I shall not be the one to offend.” Patsy skated away from the war in haste whenever there was even a possibility of its getting into the conversation. She invented an interest in the condition of the girls at the munition plant, and she was gentleness itself in her questions and answers to Ralph. The girl was really touched by the change in the looks and the manner of the young man. He was paler than she had ever seen him. It was not unbecoming to the big fellow, but it was a little pathetic—to Patsy. He was quieter, less talkative, not at all assertive. “Something has gone out of him,” Patsy told herself. What was it? And it was not strange at all that she should have said to herself, “There’s been a girl somewhere, and he’s lost her.” She wondered if it could be that the girl had like herself believed in Belgium and France. Perhaps she was a nurse and had insisted on going, and Ralph had broken with her. He’d do that, she thought to herself, with a stiffening spine which she immediately limbered, when she caught his eyes on her.
As for Ralph, he had come prepared to be very, very polite to Patsy. He would not force her attention, he would talk only about the things he knew she was interested in and he would agree with her if it choked him. But somehow he found himself talking quite freely of things he was interested in and which Patsy herself had led him to. He talked well and reasonably of the munition plants, and he didn’t take a single fling at “welfare work.” He was amazed how all these things seemed to have fallen into relation to other things, or, rather, how there seemed to be other things as well.
And Patsy’s eyes—he softened and trembled under them. They were so gentle and half-pitying. What in the world could it mean? He knew well enough that back in that active little brain something was revolving—something about him. But never in his life would he have figured out that Patsy, as she sat quietly discussing Sabinsport factories, was building a romance of which he was the broken-hearted villain and a fair-haired nurse in France the broken-hearted heroine.
After dinner, when they had gathered in the parson’s big library for a talk, Patsy had another surprise, for now Ralph was almost ostentatious in the interest he showed in Dick’s war library—a collection which would have been remarkable anywhere, but which was particularly noticeable here, five hundred miles from the sea. It included files of Vorwaerts, of Le Temps, Le Matin, London Times, of political weeklies of many countries, besides scores and scores of pamphlets and books. Again and again in the past two years, Dick had urged his friend to use his library. “You have no right as a citizen of a country which is getting deeper and deeper into this thing not to follow the literature of the war,” he stormed, but Ralph had hardened his judgment—he “didn’t believe in war.”
Now, however, committed to an acceptance which carried with it the obligation to know and to judge, he had turned resolutely to reading. Patsy could scarcely credit her eyes and ears when she saw him pick up book after book—criticize, ask Dick’s opinion, borrow, say, “I’ve finished this”—“I want to read that.” Where was the pugnacious, intolerant, scoffing Ralph she had fought with for two years? There could be no fighting with this man. He was too meek a seeker after knowledge, too hesitant, and apologetic in expressing opinions. Certainly something had happened to him.
Two equally puzzled young people went home that night to dream and wonder. For many weeks they continued to dream and wonder. Ralph’s reserve, tolerance, meekness, studiousness continued. He hadn’t found himself. He was so made that as long as his faith in himself wavered, as he had no fighting objective, he could not press his interest in Patsy. She seemed as inaccessible as a new faith. And Patsy, still romancing over the girl he had cruelly driven from him because of her noble devotion to the sufferers overseas, watched his changed attitude with anxiety and hope.