"You wouldn't have me not go, would you?"
She shook her head and sobbed on his shoulder. He soothed her and presently she sat up. Quite gallantly she agreed that she would stay with Emily. If he thought she was too young to marry Derry now, she would wait. If Derry went into it, it might be easier to let him go as a lover than as a husband—she thought it might be easier. Yes, she would try to sleep when she went upstairs—and she would remember that her old Daddy loved her, loved her, and she was to ask God to bless him—and keep him—when they were absent one from the other—.
She kissed him and clung to him and then went upstairs. She undressed and said her prayers, put Polly-Ann on her cushion, turned off the light, and got into bed.
Then she lay in the dark, facing it squarely.
The things she had said to her father were not true. She didn't want him to go to France. She didn't want Derry to go. She was glad that Derry's mother had made him promise. She didn't care who called him a coward. She cared only to keep her own.
There wasn't any sense in it, anyhow. Why should Daddy and Derry be blown to pieces—or made blind—or not come back at all? Just because a barbarian had brought his hordes into Belgium? Well, let Belgium take care of herself—and France.
She shuddered deeper down into the bed. She wasn't heroic. Hilda had been right about that. She was willing to knit miles and miles of wool, to go without meat, to go without wheat, to wear old clothes, to let the furnace go out and sit shivering in one room by a wood fire, she was willing to freeze and to starve, but she was not willing to send her men to France.
She found herself shaking, sobbing—.
Hitherto war had seemed a glorious thing, an inspiring thing. She had thrilled to think that she was living in a time which matched the days of Caesar and Alexander and of Napoleon, of that first Richard of England, of Charlemagne, of Nelson and of Francis Drake, of Grant and Lee and Lincoln.
Even in fiction there had been Ivanhoe and—and Alan Breck—and even poor Rawdon Crawley at Waterloo—fighters all, even the poorest of them, exalted in her eyes by their courage and the clash of arms.