ork was against war--the mission of her
life as she saw it in the intense, passionate moments when some new
absurdity of its processes appeared to her. She was ready to seize any
argument his talk offered to combat the things for which he stood. She
did not see, as her eyes poured her hot indignation into his, that his
maimed hand was twitching or how he bit his lips and flushed before he
replied:

"Each one goes where he is sent, link by link, down from the chief of
staff. Only in this way can you have that solidarity, that harmonious
efficiency which means victory."

"An autocracy, a tyranny over the lives of all the adult males in
countries that boast of the ballot and self-governing institutions!" she
put in.

"But I hope," he went on, with the quickening pulse and eager smile that
used to greet a call from Feller to "set things going" in their cadet
days, "that I may take out a squadron of dirigibles. After all this spy
business, that would be to my taste."

"And if you caught a regiment in close formation with a shower of bombs,
that would be positively heavenly, wouldn't it?" She bent nearer to him,
her eyes flaming demand and satire.

"No! War--necessary, horrible, hellish!" he replied. Something in her
seemed to draw out the brutal truth she had asked for in place of
euphonious terms.

"You apparently know where your profession ought to feel perfectly at
home--but what is the use? What?" She put her hands over her face and
shuddered. "I grow savage; but it is because I have known you so well
and because everything you say brings up its answer irresistibly to my
mind. I keep thinking of what mother said at luncheon--of her certainty
that war is coming. I see the garden spattered with blood, the wounded
and the dying--an eddy in the conflict! And I am in a controversial eddy
whirling round and round away from the main current of what you were to
tell me." She let her hands drop, but her eyes still held their lights
of hostility. "Go on. I listen!"

"When I became chief of intelligence I found that an underground wire
had been laid to the castle from the Eighth Division headquarters, which
will be our general staff headquarters in time of war," he said. "The
purpose was the same as now, but abandoned as chimerical. All that was
necessary was to install the instrument, which Feller did. I, too, saw
the plan as chimerical, yet it was a chance--the one out of a thousand.
If it should happen to succeed we sho