He lighted this
carefully and flooded his head with the coiling bluish smoke. Rosalie
was smoking a cigarette--a habit in women which he noisily denounced.
She extinguished it in an ash tray, but his anger lingered, an
unreasoning exasperation that constricted his throat. Sharply aware of
the sultriness of the evening he went hastily out to the veranda.
Morice following him with the evening paper volunteered, "I see German
submarines are operating on the Atlantic coast."
His father asserted: "This country is due for a lesson. It was anxious
enough to get into trouble, and now we'll find how it likes some severe
instruction. All the news here is bluff--the national asset. What I
hope is that business won't be entirely ruined later."
"The Germans will get the lesson," Rosalie unexpectedly declared at his
shoulder.
"You don't know what you're talking about," he replied decidedly. "The
German system is a marvel, one of the wonders of civilization."
She turned away, lightly singing a line from one of her late numbers:
"I've a Yankee boy bound for Berlin."
Morice stirred uneasily. "They got a Danish tanker somewhere off
Nantucket," he continued impotently.
August Turnbull refused to be drawn into further speech; he inhaled his
cigar with a replete bodily contentment. The oppression of dinner was
subsiding. His private opinion of the war was that it would end without
a military decision--he regarded the German system as unsmashable--and
then, with France deleted and England swamped in internal politics, he
saw an alliance of common sense between Germany and the United States.
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