intent,
almost preoccupied smile in her eyes. While he talked, asking her
questions and pressing for answers, he thought. "She's not paying any
attention to my words, but to me. Her love is like a robe about her,
covering her completely." Yet she seemed strange. Behind this love lived
a person capable of thinking and reasoning. Dorn, as sometimes happened,
grew curious about her thoughts. He increased his efforts to rivet her
attention, as if he were trying to coax a secret out of her. The
easiest way to arouse her was to say things that frightened her, to make
remarks that might give her the feeling he had some underlying idea in
his head hostile to their happiness.

The company of faces in the room emitted laughter, uttered words of
shocked contradiction, pressed themselves eagerly forward upon his
phrases. A red-faced man whose vacuity startled from behind a pair of
owlish glasses exclaimed, "That's all wrong, Dorn. Women don't want war.
Your wife would rather cut off her arm than see you go to war. And mine,
too."

The wife of the red-faced man giggled. A younger, unmarried woman posed
carelessly on the black piano bench in an effort to exaggerate the
charms of her body, spoke with a deliberate sigh.

"No, I don't agree with you, Mr. Harlan. Women are capable of
sacrifice."

She thrust forward a lavender-stockinged leg and contemplated it with a
far-away sacrificial light in her eyes. The red-faced one observed her
with sudden owlish seriousness. His argument seemed routed.

"Of course that's true," he agreed. Mr. Harlan came of a race whose
revolutionary notions expired apologetically before the first platitude
to cross their path. "We must always bear in mind that women are capable
of sacrifice; that women ..." The lavender stocking was withdrawing
itself and Mr. Harlan stammered like an orator witnessing a sudden
exodus of his audience, "that women are really capable of remarkable
things," he concluded.

Dorn was an uncommonly clever fellow, but a bit radical. He'd like to
think of something to say to him just to show him there was another side
to it. Not that he gave a damn. Some other time would do. The red face
turned with a great attentiveness toward the hoarsely oracular Mr.
Warren, his eyes dropping a furtive curtsy in the direction of the
vanished stocking.

"I never agree with Dorn," Warren was remarking, "for fear of
displeasing him."

He gazed belligerently at Anna whose eyes were attracting