"Mebbe I'm all wrong," says Mis' Toplady, "but, Ladies, I can't feel like a man getting all shot up is an occasion for jollification. I can't do it."
Us ladies all kind of breathed deep, like a vent had been opened.
"Nor me." "Nor me." "Nor me." Run 'round Mis' Sykes's setting-room, from one to one.
I wish't you could have seen Mis' Sykes. She looked like we'd declared for cannibalism and atheism and traitorism, all rolled into one.
"Ain't you ladies," she says, "no sense of the glories of war? Or what?"
"Or what," says Mis' Toplady. "That's just it—glories of what. I guess it's the what part that I sense the strongest, somehow."
Mis' Sykes laid down her paper, and crossed her hands—with the cameo ring under, and then remembered and crossed it over—and she says:
"Ladies, facts is facts. You've got to take things as they are."
Abigail Arnold flashed in.