‘Why didn’t you go?’ said Nora, half scoffing—‘with all those frocks wasting in the drawers!’
Connie retorted that as for parties, Oxford had seemed to her in the summer term the most gay and giddy place she had ever been in, and that she had always understood that in the October and Lent terms people dined out every night.
‘But all the same—one can think a little here,’ she said, slowly.
‘You didn’t care a bit about that when you first came!’ cried Nora. ‘You despised us because we weren’t soldiers, or diplomats, or politicians. You thought we were a little priggish provincial world where nothing mattered. You were sorry for us because we had only books and ideas!’
‘I wasn’t!’ said Connie, indignantly. ‘Only I didn’t think Oxford was everything—and it isn’t! Nora!’—she looked round the Oxford street with a sudden ardour, her eyes running over the groups of undergraduates hurrying back to hall—‘do you think these English boys could ever—well, fight—and die—for what you call ideas—for their country—as Otto Radowitz could die for Poland?’
‘Try them!’ The reply rang out defiantly. Connie laughed.
‘They’ll never have the chance. Who’ll ever attack England? If we had only something—something splendid, and not too far away!—to look back upon, as the Italians look back on Garibaldi—or to long and to suffer for, as the Poles long and suffer for Poland!’
‘We shall some day!’ said Nora, hopefully. ‘Mr. Sorell says every nation gets its turn to fight for its life. I suppose Otto Radowitz has been talking Poland to you?’
‘He talks it—and he lives it,’ said Connie, with emphasis. ‘It’s marvellous!—it shames one.’