The door opens and the soldier comes to the threshold.
“Look here, you ... I’m not going to have the fellows sneering at me when they come home on Monday morning, so if you are not gone to ... out of this inside two minutes....”
“Why did you come home?” cries the girl. “You beast! You brute! Why didn’t the Germans kill you?”
At that the soldier, foaming at the mouth, is lifting his clenched fist to the girl when Mona, crushing through the crowd of women and throwing down her string bag, lifts her own hand and strikes the man full in the jaw, and he falls like a log.
Then, while he squirms on the ground, stunned and winded, she turns on the men from the ale-house, who have previously been drinking with him and taunting him and egging him on.
“And you!” she cries. “What are you? Are you men? You white-livered mongrels! Your mothers were women, and they’d be ashamed of you.”
By this time the soldier has scrambled to his feet and, with blood in his mouth, he is trying to laugh.
“Ha, ha, ha! So this is another of them, is it? She’s in the same case herself, they’re telling me. Oh, I’ve heard of you, my lady. You used to think great things of yourself, but when the parson marries you there’ll be three of you before him at the altar, as the saying is. Ha, ha, ha!”
The men laugh and some of the women begin to titter. A harder blow than she had dealt the soldier had fallen upon Mona. She stands for a moment as if turned to stone, then picks up her bag, sweeps through the crowd and hastens away.
So this is what people think of her! After all the struggling of her heart and the travailing of her soul, this is what people think! Oh, God! Oh, God!