"Is that the only way it affects you?" She turned to him, apparently a trifle disappointed.
"Why, it must affect every man most as it touches his own interests. An artist would think of it as a background for contrasts--a thing to sketch or paint; a writer as something to be written down in words."
Eaton understood. She could not more plainly have asked him what he was.
"And an engineer, I suppose," he said, easily, "would think of it only as an element to be included in his formulas--an _x_, or an _a_, or a _b_, to be put in somewhere and square-rooted or squared so that the roof-truss he was figuring should not buckle under its weight."
"Oh--so that is the way you were thinking of it?"
"You mean," Eaton challenged her directly, "am I an engineer?"
"Oh, no; I was only talking in pure generalities, just as you were."
"Let us go on, then," she said gayly. "I see I can't conceal from you that I am doing you the honor to wonder what you are. A lawyer would think of it in the light of damage it might create and the subsequent possibilities of litigation." She made a little pause. "A business man would take it into account, as he has to take into account all things in nature or human; it would delay transportation, or harm or aid the winter wheat."
"Or stop competition somewhere," he observed, more interested.
The flash of satisfaction which came to her face and as quickly was checked and faded showed him she thought she was on the right track.
"Business," she said, still lightly, "will--how is it the newspapers put it?--will marshal its cohorts; it will send out its generals in command of brigades of snowplows, its colonels in command of regiments of snow-shovelers and its spies to discover and to bring back word of the effect upon the crops."
"You talk," he said, "as if business were a war."
"Isn't it?--like war, but war in higher terms."
"In higher terms?" he questioned, attempting to make his tone like hers, but a sudden bitterness now was betrayed by it. "Or in lower?"
"Why, in higher," she declared, "demanding greater courage, greater devotion, greater determination, greater self-sacrifice."
"Soldiers themselves say it, Mr. Eaton, and all the observers in this horrible war say it when they say that they find almost no cowards and very few weaklings among all the millions of every sort of men at the front. They could not say the same of those identical millions under the normal conditions of everyday business life."