“Oh, yes--yes!” she laughed, then grew serious. “My feeling about you--that you were a person to be relied on, I mean--I think it began that evening in our freshman year, after the _Lusitania_, when I stopped you on campus and you went with me, and I couldn't help crying, and you were so nice and quiet. I hardly realized then that it was the first time we'd ever really talked together--of course _I_ did all the talking!--and yet we'd known each other so many years. I thought of it afterward. But what gave me such a different view of you, I'd always thought you were one of that truculent sort of boys, always just bursting for a fight; but you showed me you'd really never had a fight in your life and hated fighting, and that you sympathized with my feeling about war.” She stopped speaking to draw in her breath with a sharp sigh. “Ah, don't you remember what I've told you all along? How it keeps coming closer and closer--and now it's almost here! Isn't it _unthinkable?_ And what can we do to stop it, we poor few who feel that we _must_ stop it?”
“Well--” Ramsey began uncomfortably. “Of course I--I--”
“You can't do much,” she said. “I know. None of us can. What can any little group do? There are so few of us among the undergraduates--and only one in the whole faculty. All the rest are for war. But we mustn't give up; we must never feel afterward that we left anything undone; we must fight to the last breath!”
“'Fight'?” he repeated wonderingly, then chuckled.
“Oh, as a figure of speech,” she said, impatiently. “Our language is full of barbaric figures left over from the dark ages. But, oh, Ramsey!”--she touched his sleeve--“I've heard that Fred Mitchell is saying that he's going to Canada after Easter, to try to get into the Canadian aviation corps. If it's true, he's a dangerous firebrand, I think. Is it true?”
“I guess so. He's been talking that way some.”
“But why do you _let_ him talk that way?” she cried. “He's your roommate; surely you have more influence with him than anybody else has. Couldn't you--”
He shook his head slowly, while upon his face the faintly indicated modellings of a grin hinted of an inner laughter at some surreptitious thought. “Well, you know, Fred says himself sometimes, I don't seem to be much of a talker exactly!”