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“I can’t help it, dad,” Julie returned meekly. “It’s the way I really feel.”

“Then you should keep still about it. Nice sort of part we should have played in the war if every wife had taken that attitude!”

Stacey, who thought his sister was being badly scolded for no reason at all, gave her a sly friendly smile, at which her face brightened. She recovered so quickly, indeed, and her husband had shown, throughout, such absence of any discomfort, that Stacey concluded Julie must be inured to this sort of harshness. He tried to remember whether his father had always been so sharp with her, but couldn’t.

“Jimmy would have had his chance, no doubt,” Mr. Carroll remarked, “if the war had lasted a few months longer, as it should have.” He frowned. “I believe,” he went on solemnly, “that the Armistice will prove to be the biggest disaster the world has ever known.” And he looked about him fiercely.

The first time that Stacey had heard this sentiment expressed (at tea, in Rome, at the house of an elderly American gentleman whom every one cultivated because he mysteriously always had butter and sugar), he had first felt genuine horror, and then immediately had flown into a white ungovernable rage during which he said things that had reduced the kindly old gentleman, who was used to having every one pleasant, to a state of helpless trembling discomfort. However, by now Stacey was growing used to the sentiment (it had been mentioned, for instance, on the boat, and the smoking-room of the Pullman car had rung with it). It no longer produced in him any emotion save a weary scorn.