She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the edge of
the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her will
before she called aloud to him: "George!"
He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence,
before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, "Well?"
"Oh, how united we are!" she exulted, and then she swooped down the
steps to him. "What is it?" she cried.
"It's war," he said, and he pulled her up to him and kissed her.
She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion,
and uttered from deep in her throat. "How glorious!"
"It's war," he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she
did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think
of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship,
which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had
been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise
it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his
abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his
old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed
and took up the law.
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