exclamation evoked, she clasped her hands over her
knees and swung back and forth in the ecstasy of seventeen.

"Splendid! I should say so!" She nestled the curling tip of her tongue
against her teeth, as if the recollection must also be tasted.
"Splendid, enchanting, enlightening, stupendous, and wickedly expensive!
Another girl and I did it all on our own."

"O-oh!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, oh, oh!" she repeated after him. "Oh, what, please?"

"Oh, nothing!" he said. It was quite comprehensible to him how well
equipped she was to take care of herself on such an adventure.

"Precisely, when you come to think it over!" she concluded.

"What interested you most? What was the big lesson of all your
journeying?" he asked, ready to play the listener.

"Being born and bred on a frontier, of an ancestry that was born and
bred on a frontier, why, frontiers interested me most," she said. "I
collected impressions of frontiers as some people collect pictures. I
found them all alike--stupid, just stupid! Oh, so stupid!" Her frown
grew with the repetition of the word; her fingers closed in on her palm
in vexation. He recollected that he had seen her like this two or three
times at La Tir, when he had found the outbursts most entertaining. He
imagined that the small fist pressed against the table edge could
deliver a stinging blow. "As stupid as it is for neighbors to quarrel!
It put me at war with all frontiers."

"Apparently," he said.

She withdrew her fist from the table, dropped the opened hand over the
other on her knee, her body relaxing, her wrath passing into a kind of
shamefacedness and then into a soft, prolonged laugh.

"I laugh at myself, at my own inconsistency," she said. "I was warlike
against war. At all events, if there is anything to make a teacher of
peace lose her temper it is the folly of frontiers."

"Yes?" he exclaimed. "Yes? Go on!" And he thought: "I'm really having a
very good time."

"You see, I came home from my tour with an idea--an idea for a life
occupation just as engrossing as yours," she went on, "and opposed to
yours. I saw there was no use of working with the grown-up folks. They
must be left to The Hague conferences and the peace societies. But
children are quite alike the world over. You can plant thoughts in the
young that will take root and grow as they grow."

"Patriotism, for instance," he observed narrowly.

"No, the follies of martial patriotism! The wickedness of war, which is