ey did something for me."

"How do you make that out?"

The girl was silent for a moment, then she answered:

"They stood up for what was a matter of honor. They made a fight against
odds. They could have sold out easy enough."

"Well, I don't know," said the man, stretching his arms and yawning.

"No, that's just the trouble with men like you. You don't know, and you
don't care to know. You're all alike; you stand aloof or amused. A great
human wrong has taken place, and you say, 'Well, I don't know!'"

"Just a moment," interrupted the man.

"But I haven't finished," went on the girl; "there's another thing I
want to say. When Belgium made her fight, she suffered horrible things.
Her women and children were mutilated on system, as part of a cold
policy. Cruelty to the unoffending, that is what I mean by atrocities."

"I don't believe you," retorted the man.

"Come and see."

Hilda, who had run across from Ghent to London to stock up on supplies
for the Corps, was talking with John Hinchcliffe, American banker,
broker, financier. He was an old-time friend of Hilda's family--a young
widower, in that successful period of early middle-age when the hard
work and the dirty work have availed and the momentum of the career
maintains itself. In the prematurely gray hair, the good-looking face,
the abrupt speech, he was very much American. He was neat--neat in his
way of dressing, and in his compact phrases, as hard and well-rounded as
a pebble. The world to him was a place full of slackers, of lazy
good-nature, of inefficiency. Into that softness he had come with a high
explosive and an aim. He moved through life as a hunter among a covey of
tame partridges--a brief flutter and a tumble of soft flesh. He had the
cunning lines about the mouth, the glint in the eye, of the successful
man. He had the easy generosities, too, of the man who, possessing much,
can express power by endowing helpless things which he happens to like.
There was an abundant sentiment in him, sentiment about his daughter and
his flag, and the economic glory of his times. He was rather proud of
that soft spot in his make-up. When men spoke of him as hard, he smiled
to himself, for there in his consciousness was that streak of emotional
richness. If he were attacked for raiding a trolley system, he felt
that his intimates would declare, "You don't know him. Why John is a
King."

And, best of all, he had a kind of dim vision of how his little daugh