"I like you. I like you in that cap. You look as if you were sailing fast against a head wind, as if you could cut through anything."
Their turn brought them again under the women's eyes. He took her arm and drew her aside to the rail of the boat's stern. They stood there, watching the wake boiling and breaking and thinning, a white lace of froth on the glassy green. Sutton passed them.
"What's the matter with him?" she said.
"The War. He's got it on his mind. It's no use taking it like that,
Jeanne, as one consummate tragedy … How are you feeling about it?"
"I don't think I'm feeling anything—except wanting to get there. And wanting—wanting frightfully—to help."
"Unless you can go into it as if it was some tremendous, happy adventure—That's the only way to take it. I shouldn't be any good if I didn't feel it was the most romantic thing that ever happened to me…. To have let everything go, to know that nothing matters, that it doesn't matter if you're killed, or mutilated … Of course I want to help, but that would be nothing without the gamble. The danger."
He stopped suddenly in his turning and held her with his shining, excited eyes.
"War's the most romantic thing that ever happened … False romance, my father calls it. Jolly little romance about him. He'll simply make pots of money out of the war, selling motors to the Government."
"It's rather—romantic of him to give us those two ambulances, and pay for us."
"Is it? Think of the kudos he gets out of it, and the advertisement for Roden and Conway, the stinking paragraphs he'll put in the papers about himself: 'His second son, Mr. John Roden Conway, is taking out two Roden field ambulance cars which he will drive himself—'Mr. John Roden Conway and his field ambulance car. A Roden, 30 horse power.' He makes me sick."