“Indeed, I am, madam!” said Corot Mandel. “I’ve plenty to do in life without strutting around and bawling for blood at the top of my lungs!”
“Thank heaven,” added Esmé, “the President has kept us out of war. This business of butchering others never appealed to me—except for the slightly unpleasant sensations which I experience when I read the details.”
“Oh. Then unpleasant sensations so appeal to you?” inquired Westmore, very red.
“Well, they are sensations, you know,” drawled Esmé. “And, for a man who experiences few sensations of any sort, even unpleasant ones are pleasurable.”
Mandel yawned and said:
“The war is an outrageous bore. All wars are stupid to a man of temperament. Therefore, I’m a pacifist. And I had rather live under Prussian domination than rush about the country with a gun and sixty pounds of luggage on my back!”
He looked heavily at Dulcie, who had slipped out of the corner on the terrace, where he and Esmé had penned her.
“There are other things to do more interesting than jabbing bayonets into Germans,” he remarked. “Did you say you hadn’t any dance to spare us, Miss Soane? Nor you either, Miss Dunois? Oh, well.” He cast a disgusted glance at Barres, squinted at Westmore through his greasy monocle in hostile silence; then, taking Esmé’s arm, made them all a too profound obeisance and sauntered away along the terrace.
“What a pair of beasts!” said Westmore. “They make me actually ill!”