"How long have you been in the war?" asked André Dubois, passing his hand across his beard.
"We've both been in the same length of time—about six months."
"Do you like it?"
"I don't have a bad time.... But the people in Boccaccio managed to enjoy themselves while the plague was at Florence. That seems to me the only way to take the war."
"We have no villa to take refuge in, though," said Dubois, "and we have forgotten all our amusing stories."
"And in America—they like the war?"
"They don't know what it is. They are like children. They believe everything they are told, you see; they have had no experience in international affairs, like you Europeans. To me our entrance into the war is a tragedy."
"It's sort of goin' back on our only excuse for existing," put in Randolph.
"In exchange for all the quiet and the civilisation and the beauty of ordered lives that Europeans gave up in going to the new world we gave them opportunity to earn luxury, and, infinitely more important, freedom from the past, that gangrened ghost of the past that is killing Europe to-day with its infection of hate and greed of murder.
"America has turned traitor to all that, you see; that's the way we look at it. Now we're a military nation, an organised pirate like France and England and Germany."