Patsy--bewildered, shocked, wounded to the heart by Ralph's talk--promptly forbade him ever to speak to her again and went home and for the first time in her life cried herself to sleep. She had not known how completely she was counting on Ralph's sympathy. She had said to herself: "Now I know something of what he feels about people who suffer; he'll know I understand; we can work together." And here was her dream dissolved. Patsy was learning that war is not the only destroyer of human happiness and hopes.
Ralph charged their quarrel to the war, as he did everything not to his liking. Every day he pounded more emphatically on the wrong of all wars and particularly this war. Every day he preached neutrality, though it must be confessed that he did it all with decreasing faith. It was a hard rôle. He was a man without a text in which he believed to the full. Then suddenly in October he found what he was searching. Reuben Cowder had landed a munition contract. He was to convert a factory made idle by the war and build largely. Ralph was himself again. No self-respecting community should permit money to be made within its limits from war supplies. It was blood money.
You might be a town 500 miles from the Atlantic coast and 3500 miles from the fighting line, but, nevertheless, you would have felt, in October of 1914, as Sabinsport did, a very genuine concern about your ability to get through the winter without hunger and cold. The jar of Germany's first blow at Western Europe was felt in Sabinsport twenty-four hours after it was dealt. When the stock exchanges of the cities closed, credit shut up in every town of the country. The first instinctive thought of every man and woman who had debts to pay or projects to carry out was, "Where will I get the money?" The instant thought of every bank was to protect its funds--no panic--no run--but caution. Sabinsport began to "sit tight" in money matters on August 5th--and she sat tighter every day--and with reason. Orders in her mills and factories were canceled. Men went on half time. The purchasing power of the majority fell off. Men began to figure the chances of the length of the war in order to decide what they as individuals could do until they would be able again to get orders and so have work to offer; when they would be able to get a job and so pay the grocer; when they must stop credit to the retail buyer because the wholesaler had cut off their credit--these were the thoughts that occupied the mind of Sabinsport much more generally than the European war and its causes. There was a strong feeling that it would be a short war--another 1870--take Paris and the business would be over, Sabinsport believed; and, though there was real satisfaction over the turning back of the Germans at the Marne, there was a sigh, for they knew the anxiety they felt was to continue and increase.