Always when that queer, semi-dormant tribe instinct suggested that he go fight with the tribe against the tribal enemy his reason swiftly choked the impulse.  He would not fight for a political abstraction.  He had read history.  It is littered with broken treaties.  If he fought it would be because he felt there was need to strike a blow for something righteous.  And his faith in the righteousness of the Allied cause was still unfired.  He saw no mission to compel justice, to exact retribution, only a clash of Great Powers, in which the common man was fed to the roaring guns.

But he was not so obtuse as to fail of seeing the near future.  The Germans were proving a right hard nut to crack.  It might be—­remotely—­that a man would have no choice in the matter of fighting.  He saw that cloud on the horizon.  Sometimes he wished that he could muster up a genuine enthusiasm for this business of war.  He saw men who had it and wondered privately how they came by it.

If he could have felt it an imperative duty laid upon him, that would have settled certain matters out of hand.  Chief among these would have been the problem of Sophie Carr.

Sophie eluded and mystified him.  Not wholly in a physical sense—­although, to be exact, she did become less accessible in a purely physical sense.  But it went deeper than that.  During the eighteen months following Thompson’s motor-sales debut he never succeeded in establishing between them the same sense of spiritual communion that he had briefly glimpsed those few minutes in Carr’s home on the way he opened his salesroom.

There was Tommy, for instance.  Tommy was far closer to Sophie Carr than he, Thompson, could manage to come, no matter how he tried.  He and Tommy were friends.  They had apartments in the same house.  They saw each other constantly.  The matter of competition in business was purely nominal.  They were both too successful in business to be envious of each other in that respect.  But where Sophie Carr was concerned it was a conflict, no less existent because neither man ever betrayed his consciousness of such a conflict.  Indeed Thompson sometimes wondered uneasily if Ashe’s serenity came from an understanding with her.  But he doubted that.  Tommy had not won—­yet.  That intangible yet impenetrable wall which was rising about Sophie was built of other, sterner stuff.

She seldom touched on the war, never more than a casual sentence or two.  Perhaps a phrase would flash like a sword, and then her lips would close.  Carr would discuss the war from any angle whatsoever, at any time.  It became an engrossing topic with him, as if there were phases that puzzled him, upon which he desired light.  He ceased to be positive.  But his daughter shunned war talk.