Dave Cowan, who always listened attentively to Doctor Purdy for new words, was thus enabled to enlighten Winona about her own and other people’s phagocytes; and Winona, overwhelmed by his mass of detail—­for Dave had supplemented Purdy’s lecture with fuller information from his encyclopedia—­had sighed and said:  “Oh, dear!  We seem to be living over a volcano!”

This had caused Dave to become more volubly instructive.

“Of course!  Didn’t you know that?  How thick do you suppose the crust of the earth is, anyway?  All we humans are—­we’re plants that have grown out of the cooled crust of a floating volcano; plants that can walk and talk, but plants just the same.  We float round the sun, which is only another big volcano that hasn’t cooled yet—­good thing for us it hasn’t—­and the sun and us are floating round some other volcano that no one has discovered yet because the circle is too big, and that one is probably circling round another one—­and there you are.  That’s plain, isn’t it?”

“Not very,” said Winona.

“Well, I admit there’s a catch in it I haven’t figured out yet, but the facts are right, as far as I’ve gone.  Anyway, here we are, and we got here by fighting, and we’ll have to keep on fighting, one way or another, if we’re to get any place else.”

“I don’t know anything about all that,” said Winona; “but sometimes I almost think the Germans deserve a good beating.”

This was extreme for Winona, the arch pacifist.

“You almost think so, eh?  Well, that’s a good specimen of almost thinking.  Because the Germans don’t deserve any such thing unless someone can give it to them.  If the bird can swallow the worm the bird deserves the worm.  The most of us merely almost think.”

It was much later—­an age later, it seemed to Winona—­for her country, as she wrote in her journal, had crossed the Rubicon—­that she went to attend a meeting of protest in a larger city than Newbern; a meeting of mothers and potential mothers who were persuaded that war was never excusable.

She had listened to much impassioned oratory, with a sickening surprise that it should leave her half-hearted in the cause of peace at any price; and she had gone to take her train for home, troubled with a monstrous indecision.  Never before had she suffered an instant’s bewilderment in detecting right from wrong.

As she waited she had observed on a siding a long, dingy train, from the windows of which looked the faces of boys.  She was smitten with a quick curiosity.  There were tall boys and short boys; and a few of them were plump, but mostly they were lean, with thin, browned faces, and they were all ominously uniformed.  Their keen young faces crowded the open windows of the cars, and they thronged upon the platforms to make noisy purchases from younger boys who offered them pitiful confections from baskets and trays.