“I am better at guessing secrets than you are,” she retorted a little insolently.
He was silent for some moments. The faint curve of her lips had again given him almost a shock.
“Because I met some one quite lately--within the last few hours, as a matter of fact--with a mouth exactly like yours.”
“But what a horrible thing!” she exclaimed, drawing out a little mirror from the bag by her side and gazing into it. “How unpleasant to have any one else going about with a mouth exactly like one’s own! No, I never had a brother, Mr. Orden, or a sister, and, as you may have heard, I am an enfant mechante. I live in London, I model very well, and I talk very bad sociology. As I think I told you, I know your anarchist friend, Miles Furley.”
“I shouldn’t call Furley an anarchist,” protested Julian.
“Well, he is a Socialist. I admit that we are rather lax in our definitions. You see, there is just one subject, of late years, which has brought together the Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a leader, I think that this dear, smug country of yours may have to face the greatest surprise of its existence.”
“So unusual in a woman!” she mocked. “Do you notice how every one is trying to avoid the subject of the war? I give them another half-course, don’t you? I am sure they cannot keep it up.”
“They won’t go the distance,” Julian whispered. “Listen.”
“The question to be considered,” Lord Shervinton pronounced, “is not so much when the war will be over as what there is to stop it? That is a point which I think we can discuss without inviting official indiscretions.”
“If other means fail,” declared the Bishop, “Christianity will stop it. The conscience of the world is already being stirred.”
“Our enemies,” the Earl pronounced confidently from his place at the head of the table, “are already a broken race. They are on the point of exhaustion. Austria is, if possible, in a worse plight. That is what will end the war--the exhaustion of our opponents.”
“The deciding factor,” Mr. Hannaway Wells put in, with a very non-committal air, “will probably be America. She will bring her full strength into the struggle just at the crucial moment. She will probably do what we farther north have as yet failed to do: she will pierce the line and place the German armies in Flanders in peril.”