He stopped, vaguely uncomfortable in his exaltation.
“It’s killin’,” she said, “an’ killin’ ’s killin’.”
He stood still on the walk, regardless of the passers, and shook her arm.
“Good heavens,” he said, “women had ought to see that. Women are better’n men, and they’d ought to see it! Can’t you get past the killin’? Can’t you understand they might have a thunderin’ reason?”
“_No_ reason don’t matter,” she said. “It’s killin’. And it ain’t anything else.”
He walked on, his head bent, his eyes on the ground. She knew that he was disappointed in her—but she was too much shaken to think about that. She remembered how her mother had watched her brother go out to fight after some mean uprising of drunken whites against the Indians. Nobody knew now what it had been about, but six men had been shot. That stayed.
Presently the Inger raised his head, and walked with it thrown back again. Women, he supposed, _wouldn’t_ understand. They were afraid—they hated a gun—they hated a scratch. There was the woman with the blue-boned hand and wrist and the pink spangled fan—_she_ understood, it seemed. But somehow that proved nothing, and he freed his thought of her.
A window of birds took his fancy. The poor things, trying to sleep in the night light, were tucked uncomfortably about their cages, while their soft breasts and wings attracted to the feather shop possible buyers. The Inger looked at them, thinking. He turned excitedly.
“I get you about that red bird,” he cried, “when you said not kill it! Well, there wasn’t any reason for killin’ the red bird—not any real reason. I don’t blame you for rowin’ at it. But can’t you see that killin’ men in war is differ’nt?”
She looked upon him with sudden attention. While he was being directed to their street, she stood thinking about what he had said.
“Is that the way you felt about it when you first said you was going to the war?” she asked when he joined her.
“Gosh, no,” he replied almost reverently. “All I been wantin’ to go to war for was to raise hell—legitimate. _Don’t_ you see no differ’nce?” he repeated.
It was then that she began to understand what a mighty thing had happened to him. Her insistence that war was merely killing, was merely murder, had done violence to his new idealism. And without the skill to correlate her impressions of this, she divined that here was something which was showing her, once more, the measure of this man. And she saw, too, that now she should not fail him.