“I did think so till you spoke,” snapped Mamise in all the bitterness of the ancient feud between loveliness unashamed and unlovely shame.
Abbie felt unwelcome. “Well, I just dropped over because Jake’s went out to some kind of meetin’.”
“With whom? Where?”
“Oh, some of the workmen––a lot of soreheads lookin’ for more wages.”
Mamise was indignant: “The soldiers get thirty dollars a month on a twenty-four-hour, seven-day shift. Jake gets more than that a week for loafing round the shop about seven hours a day. How on earth did you ever tie yourself up to such a rotten bounder?”
Abbie longed for a hot retort, but was merely peevish:
“Well, I ain’t seen you marryin’ anything better. I guess I’ll go home. I don’t seem to be wanted here.”
This was one of those exact truths that decent people must immediately deny. Mamise put her arms about Abbie and said:
“Forgive me, dear––I’m a beast. But Jake is such a––” She felt Abbie wriggling ominously and changed to: “He’s so unworthy of you. These are such terrible times, and the world is in such horrible need of everybody’s help and especially of ships. It breaks my heart to see anybody wasting his time and strength interfering with the builders instead of 228 joining them. It’s like interfering with the soldiers. It’s a kind of treason. And besides, he does so little for you and the children.”
This last Abbie was willing to admit. She shed a few tears of self-esteem, but she simply could not rise to the heights of suffering for anything as abstract as a cause or a nation or a world. She was like so many of the air-ships the United States was building then: she could not be induced to leave the ground or, if she got up, to glide back safely.