She laughed dolefully. “It seems to me rather more like it than that!”
They had begun to walk on again, and Ramsey was aware that they had passed the “frat house,” where his dinner was probably growing cold. He was aware of this, but not sharply or insistently. Curiously enough, he did not think about it. He had begun to find something pleasant in the odd interview, and in walking beside a girl, even though the girl was Dora Yocum. He made no attempt to account to himself for anything so peculiar.
For a while they went slowly together, not speaking, and without destination, though Ramsey vaguely took it for granted that Dora was going somewhere. But she wasn't. They emerged from the part of the small town closely built about the university and came out upon a bit of parked land overlooking the river; and here Dora's steps slowed to an indeterminate halt near a bench beneath a maple tree.
“I think I'll stay here a while,” she said; and as he made no response, she asked, “Hadn't you better be going back to your 'frat house' for your dinner? I didn't mean for you to come out of your way with me; I only wanted to get an answer to my question. You'd better be running back.”
He stood irresolute, not sure that he wanted his dinner just then. It would have amazed him to face the fact deliberately that perhaps he preferred being with Dora Yocum to eating. However, he faced no such fact, nor any fact, but lingered.
“I guess I can get my dinner pretty near any time. I don't--” He had a thought. “Did you--”
“Did you have your dinner before I met you?”
“I don't think people have very much appetite to-day and yesterday,” she said, with the hint of a sad laugh, “all over America.”
“It's too terrible!” she said. “I can't sit and eat when I think of the _Lusitania_--of all those poor, poor people strangling in the water--”
“No; I guess nobody can eat much, if they think about that.”
“And of what it's going to bring, if we let it,” she went on. “As if this killing weren't enough, we want to add _our_ killing! Oh, that's the most terrible thing of all--the thing it makes within us! Don't you understand?”
She turned to him appealingly, and he felt queerer than ever. Dusk had fallen. Where they stood, under the young-leaved maple tree, there was but a faint lingering of afterglow, and in this mystery her face glimmered wan and sweet; so that Ramsey, just then, was like one who discovers an old pan, used in the kitchen, to be made of chased silver.