“I understand your point of view, and I do respect it: yet, Mademoiselle, there is something that I believe is more important, and that is to see the truth. Don’t condemn too hastily. You have the gift of faith: it is a wonderful thing. We are unhappier, I grant you; but we cannot change our independence. Pardon me if I am not convinced.”
“In what way?”
“I still maintain that when the people’s eyes are open, they will see that they are the ones who are sacrificed. The nationality you speak of is a beautiful thing,—a dramatically beautiful thing. I can understand how honor, glory, duty—those Middle Ages words—thrill your class. But the others,—the peasant, the workman; no, no, he fights without understanding, blindly, and he is the one who bears the burden. For is it not true that it is the great mass, the men in the fields and in the streets, that bears the burden and receives nothing?”
She started to answer and checked herself, but immediately, impelled by an impulse too strong to be mastered, she said:
“Monsieur Magnus, it is my right to answer that. At New Year’s, 1914, in my family, we sat down to table, fifteen of us: my mother, my father, my five brothers, uncles and cousins—fifteen. Five are left to-day: myself, a brother and two cousins at the front, and a brother who in another year will go to do his duty as a volunteer; and, if for any reason he should seek to avoid it, we would disown him though he were the last of our name.”
She said it quietly without change of voice. We looked at her, incapable of reply. Tears started to the eyes of Peter Magnus. He took off his hat and said solemnly:
“If all the world were like you, Mademoiselle Duvernoy, there would be no rebels like me.”
And, for that, I shall always maintain a respect for Peter Magnus.
X
Later in the afternoon I came out of the smoking room on the upper deck for a breath of fresh air. To my surprise I had hardly started for a turn among the rafts and lifeboats when I perceived the slender figure of Mademoiselle Duvernoy standing by the rail. I went to her. One glance, and I knew that her mood had been melancholy.