He remained silent, though she waited for him to reply.
"You know that is so, Mr. Eaton," she said. "One has only to look on the streets of any great city to find thousands of men who have not had the courage and determination to carry on their share of the ordinary duties of life. Recruiting officers can pick any man off the streets and make a good soldier of him, but no one could be so sure of finding a satisfactory employee in that way. Doesn't that show that daily life, the everyday business of earning a living and bearing one's share in the workaday world, demands greater qualities than war?"
Her face had flushed eagerly as she spoke; a darker, livid flush answered her words on his.
"But the opportunities for evil are greater, too," he asserted almost fiercely.
"What do you mean?"
"For deceit, for lies, for treachery, Miss Dorne! Violence is the evil of war, and violence is the evil most easily punished, even if it does not bring its own punishment upon itself. But how many of those men you speak of on the streets have been deliberately, mercilessly, even savagely sacrificed to some business expediency, their future destroyed, their hope killed!" Some storm of passion, whose meaning she could not divine, was sweeping him.
"You mean," she asked after an instant's silence, "that you, Mr. Eaton, have been sacrificed in such a way?"
"I am still talking in generalities," he denied ineffectively.
He saw that she sensed the untruthfulness of these last words. Her smooth young forehead and her eyes were shadowy with thought. Eaton was uneasily silent. The train roared across some trestle, giving a sharp glimpse of gray, snow-swept water far below. Finally Harriet Dorne seemed to have made her decision.
"I think you should meet my father, Mr. Eaton," she said. "Would you like to?"