"When he knows that you'd have gone before any of them if you were young enough."
"I can't say anything. You'll have to."
"No, Anthony. I can't ask him to go any more than you can. Nicky is the only one of us who has any right to."
"Or Dorothy. Dorothy'd be in the trenches now if she had her way."
"I can't think how he can bear to look at Dorothy."
But in the end she did say something.
She went to him in his room upstairs where he worked now, hiding himself away every evening out of their sight. "Almost," she thought, "as if he were ashamed of himself."
Her heart ached as she looked at him; at the fair, serious beauty of his young face; at the thick masses of his hair that would not stay as they were brushed back, but fell over his forehead; it was still yellow, and shining as it shone when he was a little boy.
He was writing. She could see the short, irregular lines of verse on the white paper. He covered them with his hand as she came in lest she should see them. That hurt her.
"Michael," she said, "I wonder if you ever realize that we are at war."