They had a great deal of armor and very few joints, and it discouraged Professor Waring to leave these unpierced spots to the perhaps less-practised hands of neutrals.
But it was not until the destruction of Louvain that he grasped to the full the reaction of his former antagonists. When Professor Waring read a signed letter from some of the German professors agreeing to the destruction of the famous Belgian library he acquiesced in the war. He stood in front of his wife and woke Stella up in order to make his declaration.
"Henrietta, there is a war," he announced. "It is useless for you to assert that there is not. Not only is there a war, but there should be one; and if I were twenty years younger, though wholly unaccustomed to the noisy mechanisms of physical destruction, I should join in it. As it is, I propose to write a treatise upon the German mind. It is not one of my subjects, and I shall probably have to neglect valuable work in order to undertake it; still, my researches into the rough Stone Age will no doubt greatly assist me. Many just parallels have already occurred to me. I hope that no one in this house will be guilty of so uneducated a frame of mind as to sympathize with the Teutonic iconoclasts even to the extent of asserting, as I believe I heard you assert just now, Henrietta, that none of them exist."
Mrs. Waring murmured gently that she thought an intense hopefulness might refine degraded natures, but the next day she bought wool and began to knit a muffler. She had capitulated to the fact of the war. While she knitted she patiently asserted that there was no life, truth, intelligence, or force in matter; and Stella, when she came home in the evening, picked up the dropped stitches.
It was strange to Stella that her only personal link with the war was a man whom she had seen only once and might never see again. She thought persistently of Julian. She thought of him for Marian's sake, because Marian was half frozen with misery. She thought of him because unconsciously he stood in her mind for England. He was an adventurer, half-god, half-child, who had the habit of winning without the application of fear. She thought of him because he was the only young, good-looking man of her own class with whom she had ever talked.
Marian was afraid that Stella might think she had been unsympathetic to Julian about his mission. She told Stella, with her usual direct honesty, how angry she had been with him.
"I know I was nasty to him," she said. "I can't bear to have any one involve me first and tell me about it afterward."
"Of course you can't," agreed Stella, flaming up with a gust of annoyance more vivid than Marian's own. "How like him! How exactly like him to be so high-handed! Fancy whirling you along behind him as if you were a sack of potatoes! Of course you were annoyed, and I hope you gave him a good sharp quarrel. One only has to look at Julian to see that he ought to be quarreled with at regular intervals in an agreeable way for the rest of his life."
"I don't like quarrels," Marian said slowly. "They don't seem to me to be at all agreeable; but I don't think Julian will act without consulting me again."
Stella looked at Marian curiously. What was this power that Marian had, which moved with every fold of her dress, and stood at guard behind her quiet eyes? How had she made Julian understand without quarreling that he must never repeat his independences? Stella was sure Marian had made him understand it. It would be of no use to ask Marian how she had done it, because Marian would only laugh and say: "Nonsense! It was perfectly easy." She probably did not know herself what was the secret of her power; she would merely in every circumstance in life composedly and effectively use it. Was it perhaps that though Julian had involved her actions, he had never involved Marian? Was love a game in which the weakest lover always wins?