“What’s the matter?” asked her cousin. “Have they found the man who killed that old woman?” She herself was deeply interested in a murder case in Chicago.
Ellen did not hear her. “Well, thank _goodness!_” she exclaimed. “England is going to help France and Belgium!”
Maggie looked over her shoulder disapprovingly. “Oh, I think it’s awful! Another country going to war! England a Christian nation, too! I don’t see how Christians _can_ go to war. And I don’t see what call the Belgians had, anyhow, to fight Germany. They might have known they couldn’t stand up against such a big country. All the Germans wanted to do was just to walk along the roads. They wouldn’t have done any harm. Mr. Schnitzler was explaining it to me down at the office.
“They’d promised they wouldn’t,” repeated Ellen. “And the Belgians had promised everybody that they wouldn’t let anybody go across their land to pick on France that way. They kept their promise and the Germans didn’t. It makes me _mad!_ I wish to goodness our country would help them!”
Maggie was horrified. “_Ellen Boardman_, would you want _Americans_ to commit murder? You’d better go to church with me next Sunday and hear Mr. Wentworth preach one of his fine sermons.”
Ellen did this, and heard a sermon on passive resistance as the best answer to violence. She was accustomed to accepting without question any statement she found in a printed book, or what any speaker said in any lecture. Also her mind, having been uniquely devoted for many years to the problems of office administration, moved with more readiness among letter-files and card-catalogues of customers than among the abstract ideas where now, rather to her dismay, she began to find her thoughts centering. More than a week passed after hearing that sermon before she said, one night as she was brushing her hair: “About the Belgians—if a robber wanted us to let him go through this room so he could get into Mrs. Wilson’s room and take all her money and maybe kill her, would you feel all right just to snuggle down in bed and let him? Especially if you had told Mrs. Wilson that she needn’t ever lock the door that leads into our room, because you’d see to it that nobody came through?”