"Why is fighting part of that work, Uncle Ned?"
"Ah, why! Greed, which wants what is the right of others; pride, which resents even a fancied interference with its own; anger, which cries for revenge; these are the reasons."
Dolly looked very deeply serious.
"Why do you care so much about it, Dolly?" her aunt asked at length, after a meditative pause of several minutes.
"I would be sorry to have the 'Achilles' go into battle," said Dolly; and a perceptible slight shudder passed over her shoulders.
"Is the 'Achilles' so much to you, just because you have seen her?"
"No—" said Dolly thoughtfully; "it isn't the ship; it's the people."
"Oh!—But what do you know of the people?"
"I saw a good many of them, Aunt Harry."
Politic Dolly! She had really seen only one. Yet she had no idea of being politic; and why she did not say whom she had seen, and what reason she had for being interested in him, I cannot tell you.