During her husband’s lengthy speech Barbara had listened quietly, but she now made an odd little sound, which one would hardly like to describe as a sniff at the authority of the United States Government, nor yet at her husband.
“Oh you need not think I will interfere with you or your work, Dick, nor yet that the United States Government will consider my presence in France a burden. If I was useful to them once, when I knew much less about the Red Cross nursing than I do at present, I believe I can be useful to them again.”
Then Barbara paused, waiting for an exclamation of surprise, perhaps for one of disapproval.
However, partly through mystification, partly because Richard Thornton did not consider that his wife actually meant what she said, even if she had suggested it he continued silent.
Then with the suddenness which surprised no one who knew her intimately, Barbara Thornton’s manner all at once became very grave and sweet.
“I wonder if you understood me, dear?” she asked, turning so that her eyes now met her husband’s directly.
“If you did, I presume you think I spoke on the spur of the moment and without being in earnest. I know I often do talk in that way. But I have been thinking, oh, for a long time, even before you began to say it was your duty to go back into the ambulance work in France and not claim exemption because of your eyes, that I had no real right to give up my Red Cross work and be married and take things easily, before this terrible war was ended. You and I, who have lived and worked in France since this war began know only too well how weary, how almost utterly exhausted by their long strain, the French now are. Why, sometimes I believe if our country had not entered the war just when she did—but then I must not speak of failure. For after all, nothing can stop the progress of evolution, no weariness, no mistakes, and evolution is what this war for democracy means. Still, that does not give any one of us the right to be a slacker, and that is the way I have been feeling lately.”
After this speech Richard Thornton gazed at his wife, not only with amazement, but with actual disfavor.
“Barbara,” he demanded, “isn’t being married and having a baby and doing what you can to help with the Red Cross work here and giving all the money we can possible afford sufficient to content you? I did not suppose you would allow even the war to change you into one of the sentimental women who neglect their own duties to take up with outside ones because they are more interesting, more exciting, perhaps, than their own responsibilities.”
Barbara was silent an instant. Then she answered slowly, as if she were thinking quietly concerning her husband’s statement: