...."

She sat very still brooding on that idea for a time, and then stood up.

"What nonsense one talks!" she cried, and yawned. "I wonder why poor
Teddy doesn't send me a post card or something to tell me his address. I
tell you what I _am_ afraid of sometimes about him, Cissie."

"Yes?" said Cissie.

"Loss of memory. Suppose a beastly lump of shell or something whacked
him on the head.... I had a dream of him looking strange about the eyes
and not knowing me. That, you know, really _may_ have happened.... It
would be beastly, of course...."

Cissie's eyes were critical, but she had nothing ready to say.

There were some moments of silence.

"Oh! bed," said Letty. "Though I shall just lie scheming."

Section 2

Cissie lay awake that night thinking about her sister as if she had
never thought about her before.

She began to weigh the concentrated impressions of a thousand memories.
She and her sister were near in age; they knew each other with an
extreme intimacy, and yet it seemed to Cissie that night as though she
did not know Letty at all. A year ago she would have been certain she
knew everything about her. But the old familiar Letty, with the bright
complexion, and the wicked eye, with her rebellious schoolgirl
insistence upon the beautifulness of "Boof'l young men," and her frank
and glowing passion for Teddy, with her delight in humorous
mystifications and open-air exercise and all the sunshine and laughter
of life, this sister Letty, who had been so satisfactory and complete
and final, had been thrust aside like a mask. Cissie no longer knew her
sister's eyes. Letty's hand had become thin and unfamiliar and a little
wrinkled; she was sharp-featured and thin-lipped; her acts, which had
once been predictable, were incomprehensible, and Cissie was thrown back
upon speculations. In their schooldays Letty had had a streak of intense
sensibility; she had been easily moved to tears. But never once had she
wept or given any sign of weeping since Teddy's name had appeared in the
casualty list.... What was the strength of this tragic tension? How far
would it carry her? Was Letty really capable of becoming a Charlotte
Corday? Of carrying out a scheme of far-seeing vengeance, of making her
way through long months and years nearer and nearer to revenge?

Were such revenges possible?

Would people presently begin to murder the makers of the Great War? What
a strange thing it would be in history if so there c