She regarded him with her lips quivering, a quick layer of tears forming, trembling and venturing to the edge of her lashes.
"Hal—Hal—a—a fellow that I've banked on like I have you! It ain't that—you know it ain't. I could have waited for ten times this long. It's only I—I'm ashamed, Hal. Ashamed. there ain't been a single gap in the chorus from one of the men enlisting that my heart ain't just dropped in my shoes like dough. I never envied a girl on my life the way I did Elaine Vavasour when she stood on the curb at the Battery the other day crying and watching Charlie Kirkpatrick go marching off. Charlie was a pacifist, too, as long as the country was out of war, and there was something to argue about. The minute the question was settled, he shut up, buckled on his belt and went! That's the kind of a pacifist to be. The kind of fellow that when he sees peace slipping, buckles on and starts out for a new peace; a realer peace. That's the kind of a fellow I thought you—you—-"
Her voice broke then abruptly, in a rain of tears, and she raised the crook of her arm to her face with the gesture of a child. "That—that's the kind of a fellow I—I—-"
His cigarette discarded and curling up in a little column of smoke between them, he sat regarding her, a heave surge of red rising above the impeccable white of his collar into the roots of his hair. It was as if her denouncement had come down in a welt across his face.
"Nobody ever—nobody ever dared to talk like this to me before. Nobody ever dared to call me a coward. Nobody. Because it ain't so!"
"I know it ain't, Hal. If it was could I have been so strong for you all these months? I knew the way you showed yourself in the Fifty-fifth Street fire. I read about it in the papers before I ever knew you. I—I know the way you mauled Ed Stein, twice your size, the night he tried to—to get fresh with me. I know you ain't a slacker in your heart, Hal, but I—I couldn't marry a man that got fake exemption. Couldn't, no matter how it broke my heart to see him go marching off! Couldn't! Couldn't!"
"That's what it means, Blossum—marching off!"
"I know it, but how—how could I marry a man that wasn't fit to war his country's uniform even in a show. I—I couldn't marry a man like that if it meant the solid gold suite in the solid goldest hotel in this town. I couldn't marry a—a fake khaki-boy!"
"Ain't there no limit, Bloss, to the way you can make a fellow feel like dirt under your feet? My God! ain't there no limit?"
"There—there's nothing on earth can make a man of you, Hal, nothing on God's earth but War! Every once in a while there's some little reason seems to spring up for there bein' a war. You're one of them reasons, Hal. Down in my heart I know it that you'll come back, and when I get a hunch it's a hunch! Down in my heart I know it, dear, that you'll come back to me. But you'll come back a man, you'll come back with the yellow streak pure gold, you'll-you'll come back to me pure gold, dear. I know it. I know it."