under her hand, on the table, and picked it up. She had only
glanced at the head-lines yesterday. It took a lot of moral courage to
read the newspapers in these days. As she read, her face changed,
darkened, set.

The little boy, struggling with his underwear, looked at her and decided
not to ask for help.

She was thinking as she read, "The Treaty muddle worse than ever. Great
Britain sending around to all her colonies asking for the biggest navy
in the world. Our own navy constantly enlarged at enormous cost.
Constantinople to be left Turkish because nobody wants anybody else to
have it. Armenian babies dying like flies and evening cloaks advertised
to sell for six hundred dollars. Italy land-grabbing. France frankly for
anything except the plain acceptance of the principles we thought the
war was to foster. The same reaction from those principles starting on a
grand scale in America. Men in prison for having an opinion . . . what a
hideous bad joke on all the world that fought for the Allies and for the
holy principles they claimed! To think how we were straining every nerve
in a sacred cause two years ago. Neale's enlistment. Those endless
months of loneliness. That constant terror about him. And homes like
that all over the world . . . with _this_ as the result. Could it have
been worse if we had all just grabbed what we could get for ourselves,
and had what satisfaction we could out of the baser pleasures?"

She felt a mounting wave of horror and nausea, and knowing well from
experience what was on its way, fought desperately to ward it off,
reading hurriedly a real-estate item in the newspaper, an account of a
flood in the West, trying in vain to fix her mind on what she read. But
she could not stop the advance of what was coming. She let the newspaper
fall with a shudder as the thought arrived, hissing, gliding with
venomous swiftness along the familiar path it had so often taken to her
heart . . . "suppose this reactionary outburst of hate and greed and
intolerance and imperialistic ambitions all around, means that the
'peace' is an armed truce only, and that in fifteen years the whole
nightmare will start over."

She looked down at the little boy, applying himself seriously to his
buttons. "In fifteen years' time my baby will be a man of twenty-one."

Wild cries broke out in her heart. "No, oh no! I couldn't live through
another. To see them all go, husband and sons! Not another war! Let me
live quickly,