"Oh, how could they—how could they?" she cried, with a return to incoherence. "Poor old Bobby—Oh, why can't I go out and avenge him!"
He had never heard her so emphatic. Although she was unstrung by grief, he could not refrain from presenting the corrective aspect of the case. "But don't you see, Phœbe dear, that's the spirit that has brought all this horror about? The more one avenges, the more there is to avenge. It reduces civilization to an arena, and peace merely means 'half time'—a pause during which you rest and repair yourself for new frays."
Phœbe was listening fitfully. "They must be wrong though, Paul—Oh, don't you ever feel that you could wipe such people off the face of the earth? But of course you don't—forgive me, dear."
Through a haze he saw Phœbe retreating. Mechanically he replied:
"All I feel is that some girl like you in Munich is saying exactly those words to some man like me, provided they have any who are still out of the net."
"They haven't—you may depend on it." She said it in a tone which her nervousness rendered somewhat aggressive, then halted in a panic.
He looked at her steadily. "You were going to add, 'And we shouldn't have any, either.'"
Phœbe rose and walked to the window. "Oh, it's hideous. I just can't make it out."
He had an irresistible impulse to test her.
"Would it make matters more comprehensible to you if I were to give in after all?"
She wheeled about. In her glance he read what he had dreaded to find: a hope that he would be unfaithful to the principles which she knew he venerated but which she could only partially understand. He was something Phœbe had "taken up" as she had taken up chemistry and mathematics, and the study was a little beyond her.
