the expression toward his wife for approval. She
nodded her head and tightened the thin line of her lips.

"I only meant," laughed Dorn, "that it reduces us to the sort of sanity
that wipes out the absurd, artificial notions of morality that keep
cluttering up the thought of the race. War reminds us that civilization
and murder are compatible. Lavender stockings, speaking in generalities,
are reminders that good and evil walk on equally comely legs."

Mr. Harlan, having registered indignation, now struggled vainly against
the preenings of his wit, and finally succumbed.

"In these days you can't tell Judy O'Grady and the Colonel's lady apart
by their stockings, eh?" He hammered his point home with a laugh. Warren
winked at Rachel as if to inform her of the mixed company they were in,
and Mrs. Harlan endeavored to put an end to the isolated merriment of
her husband with a "John, you're impossible!" The elderly youth,
conscious of himself as the escort of a young virgin, lowered his eyes
modestly to her ankles. Dorn, watching his wife's smile deepen, nodded
his head at her. He knew her momentary thought. She labored under the
pleasing conviction that his risque remarks were invariably inspired by
memories of her.

"Barring, of course, the unembattled stay-at-homes," he continued. "The
sanity of battlefields is in direct ratio to the insanity of the
non-combatants. You can see it already in the press. We who stay at
home endeavor to excuse the crime of war by attaching ludicrous ideals
and purposes to its result. Thus every war is to its non-combatants a
holy war. And we get a swivel-chair collection of nincompoops raving
weirdly, as the casualty lists pour in, of humanity and democracy. It
hasn't come yet, but it will."

"Then you don't believe in war?" said the red face, emerging
triumphantly upon respectable ground.

"As a phenomenon inspired by ideals or resulting in anything more
satisfactory than a wholesale loss of life, war is always a joke," Dorn
answered. He wondered whether Rachel was considering him a pompous ass.
"I have a whole-hearted respect for it, however, as a biological
excitement."

The blue sash winced primly at the word biological, and appealed to her
escort to protect her somehow from the indecencies of life. The elderly
youth answered her appeal with a tightening of his features.

"War isn't biological," he retorted in her behalf.

Dorn, wearying of his talk, waited for some one of the c