“Before the war? Of course—certainly! Everything worth having was before the war,—love, hope, confidence—before the war—the world was better to live in before the war. I grant you all that! We can, if we feel disposed to be poetical, look back and see a happy garden of Eden in England before the war—but now the gates are closed and a sword turns every way forbidding re-entrance!”
“Ah, you do think that!” she said.
“Naturally I do. And naturally I must. It does not actually surprise me, for war is a devastator of minds and morals. You thought me very harsh and unsympathetic at the time war was declared—and I know you considered me unpatriotic. Well, if it is unpatriotic to dislike the idea of men being slaughtered like animals in a meat-packer’s factory all for the pleasure of rival governments I am unpatriotic, and glory in the fact! I have no sentiment on these matters. The waving of a flag does not excite me—I don’t think any man should fight for any other man. Let each one manage his own business.”
She was silent.
“You don’t like my point of view?” he queried, after a pause.
“I think you have a great deal of right and sense on your side,” she said, slowly. “But if nations did not fight for their existence where would they be?”
“They would settle down,” said the Philosopher, complacently. “Believe me they would settle down! It’s all a repetition of the Cain and Abel story—one brother is jealous of the other and commits murder. Why should such a precedent be maintained?”
“Why, indeed?” she murmured.
“We were all happy enough and contented enough before the war,” pursued the Philosopher. “And we were immoral enough. If the war was intended to punish us for our immorality, it has failed in effect, for we are much more immoral now.”
She began to work again at her embroidery, keeping her eyes bent upon it. The Philosopher did not pursue the theme he had started; in some subtle way he was made aware that immorality was not a subject on which to engage the attention of the Sentimentalist. There are very few men who, in the presence of real purity and refinement expressed in a woman’s personality, do not hesitate to bring forward topics which however reasonable, are at the same time questionable in taste. With a mannish, smoking woman the Philosopher would have swung into brilliant diatribes concerning sex and its demands, but with this sweet, composed, dainty little lady of sentiment, he was not sure of his ground, especially in the immediate state of his own emotions. Emotions? Had he any? It seemed so,—anyway he was beginning to feel as if he had.