se of a
flush of sunburn on his hands and face. He was telling her how
he had learned to shoe horses and select cattle fit for
killing.

"Do you like to be a soldier?" she asked.

"I am not exactly a soldier," he replied.

"But you only do things for wars," she said.

"Yes."

"Would you like to go to war?"

"I? Well, it would be exciting. If there were a war I would
want to go."

A strange, distracted feeling came over her, a sense of
potent unrealities.

"Why would you want to go?"

"I should be doing something, it would be genuine. It's a
sort of toy-life as it is."

"But what would you be doing if you went to war?"

"I would be making railways or bridges, working like a
nigger."

"But you'd only make them to be pulled down again when the
armies had done with them. It seems just as much a game."

"If you call war a game."

"What is it?"

"It's about the most serious business there is,
fighting."

A sense of hard separateness came over her.

"Why is fighting more serious than anything else?" she
asked.

"You either kill or get killed--and I suppose it is
serious enough, killing."

"But when you're dead you don't matter any more," she
said.

He was silenced for a moment.

"But the result matters," he said. "It matters whether we
settle the Mahdi or not."

"Not to you--nor me--we don't care about
Khartoum."

"You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make
room."

"But I don't want to live in the desert of Sahara--do
you?" she replied, laughing with antagonism.

"I don't--but we've got to back up those who do.

"Why have we?"

"Where is the nation if we don't?"

"But we aren't the nation. There are heaps of other people
who are the nation."

"They might say they weren't either."

"Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn't be a nation. But
I should still be myself," she asserted brilliantly.

"You wouldn't be yourself if there were no nation."

"Why not?"

"Because you'd just be a prey to everybody and anybody."

"How a prey?"

"They'd come and take everything you'd got."

"Well, they couldn't take much even then. I don't care what
they take. I'd rather have a robber who carried me off than a
millionaire who gave me everything you can buy."

"That's because you are a romanticist."

"Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never
go away, and people just living in the houses. It's all so stiff
and stupid. I hate soldiers, they are stiff an