her first visit to the telephone.
After her hastening steps had carried her along the tunnel to the
telephone, she set down the lantern and pressed the spring that opened
the panel door. Another moment and she would be embarked on her great
adventure in the finality of action. That little ear-piece became a
spectre of conscience. She drew back convulsively and her hands flew to
her face; she was a rocking shadow in the thin, reddish light of the
lantern.

Conscious mind had torn off the mask from subconscious mind, revealing
the true nature of the change that war had wrought in her. She who had
resented Feller's part--what a part she had been playing! Every word,
every shade of expression, every telling pause of abstraction after
Westerling confessed that he had made war for his own ends had been
subtly prompted by a purpose whose actuality terrified her.

Her hypocrisy, she realized, was as black as the wall of darkness beyond
the lantern's gleam. All her pictures became a whirling involution of
extravaganza and all the speeches of the characters of the scenes a kind
of wail. Then this demoralization passed, as a nightmare passes, with
Westerling's boast again in her ears. She was seeing Hugo Mallin;
hearing him announce his principles in sight of the spot where Dellarme
had died:

"I love my country.... But I know that other men love theirs.... Men
should be brave for their convictions.... The Browns are fighting for
their homes.... They are fighting, as I should want to fight, against
murder and burglary.... I will fight with my face to the white posts,
but not with my back to them."

She was seeing the faces of her children; she was hearing them repeat:

"But I shall not let a burglar drive me from my house. If an enemy tries
to take my land I shall appeal to his sense of justice and reason with
him; but if he then persists I shall fight for my home."

When war's principles, enacted by men, were based on sinister trickery
called strategy and tactics, should not women, using such weapons as
they had, also fight for their homes? Marta's hands swept down from her
eyes; she was on fire with resolution.

Forty miles away a bell in Lanstron's bedroom and at his desk rang
simultaneously. At the time he and Partow were seated facing each other
across a map on the table of the room where they worked together. No
persuasion of the young vice-chief, no edict of the doctors, could make
the old chief take exercise or sho