"You are, dear—you are," he replied abstractedly. But to himself he had to avow that Phœbe was in his boat—his privateer—only as supercargo. He was haunted by the problem of her fate; it weighed on him more heavily than his own.
Some weeks later he found her with red eyes, shrinking. Her manner drove from his mind a momentous development in his own affairs which he had come to announce. He talked of trivial matters, waiting for a clue. They came around to the inevitable topic, and suddenly, with a little rush of words, Phœbe suggested that he should make some compromise before it was too late.
"You might do something that would keep you from the actual fighting. Couldn't you"
Paul rose from his chair and paced the room. "Is that all you've been able to make of my abstention?" he cried. "Compromise? Now? I'm less ready to compromise than I've ever been."
The statement echoed in his ears like some death knell of reasonableness. Life was a matter of winds and currents, and one's views must be swung about like the yards of a ship if one hoped to avoid reefs. In his most lucid moments he perceived that he was stubborn, as Aunt Verona had been. Yet fatalistically he pitted his obduracy against what he regarded as the massed stubbornness of the world. He preferred shipwreck on the shores of his own Utopia to arrival in the promised land of the commonalty.
Phœbe was weeping, and he guessed that something unusual had happened. He approached to pat her shoulder and saw the tears come more freely. Then, her face buried in her hands, she explained that her brother had been killed.
For a long while Paul held her in his arms, consoling her as best he could. In the end she became quiet, and Paul, chastened, let her talk.
