He was looking at her with those shy, worshipping eyes of his that always made her marvel at her own wonderfulness. “It’s you women that make war,” he continued. “Oh, I don’t mean that you do it on purpose, but it’s in your blood. It comes from the days when to live it was needful to kill. When a man who was swift and strong to kill was the only thing that could save a woman and her brood. Every other man that crept towards them through the grass was an enemy, and her only hope was that her man might kill him, while she watched and waited. And later came the tribe; and instead of the one man creeping through the grass, the everlasting warfare was against all other tribes. So you loved only the men ever ready and willing to fight, lest you and your children should be carried into slavery: then it was the only way. You brought up your boys to be fighters. You told them stories of their gallant sires. You sang to them the songs of battle: the glory of killing and of conquering. You have never unlearnt the lesson. Man has learnt comradeship—would have travelled further but for you. But woman is still primitive. She would still have her man the hater and the killer. To the woman the world has never changed.”!

“What has become of them?” persisted Miss Tolley. After the war was over and the men, released from their long terms of solitary confinement, came back to life injured in mind and body, she was almost glad he had escaped. But at the time it filled her soul with darkness.

“Why, that’s a sign of breeding, that is, Missie,” the man had explained. “It’s the classy ones that are always the worst.” They looked at one another, and then beyond the sheltering evergreens and the wide lawns to where the great square house seemed to be listening. “Yes,” answered Madge. “It used to be a custom. Young men used to ask young women to marry them. And if they consented it was called ‘being engaged.’ Still prevails, so I am told, in certain classes.”