It was easy enough for him to evade Fred Mitchell's rallyings these days; the sprig's mood was truculent, not toward his roommate but toward Congress, which was less in fiery haste than he to be definitely at war with Germany. All through the university the change had come: athletics, in other years spotlighted at the centre of the stage, languished suddenly, threatened with abandonment; students working for senior honours forgot them; everything was forgotten except that growing thunder in the soil. Several weeks elapsed after Dora's bitter dismissal of Ramsey before she was mentioned between the comrades. Then, one evening, Fred asked, as he restlessly paced their study floor:
"Have you seen your pacifist friend lately?"
"No. Not exactly. Why?"
"Well, for my part, I think she ought to be locked up," Fred said, angrily. "Have you heard what she did this afternoon?"
"No."
"It's all over college. She got up in the class in jurisprudence and made a speech. It's a big class, you know, over two hundred, under Dean Burney. He's a great lecturer, but he's a pacifist--the only one on the faculty--and a friend of Dora's. They say he encouraged her to make this break and led the subject around so she could do it, and then called on her for an opinion, as the highest-stand student in the clas. She got up and claimed there wasn't any such thing as a legitimate cause for war, either legally or morally, and said it was a sign of weakness in a nation for it to believe that it did have cause for war.
"Well, it was too much for that little, spunky Joe Stansbury, and he jumped up and argued with her. He made her admit all the Germans have done to us, the sea murders and the land murders, the blowing up of the factories, the propaganda, the strikes, trying to turn the United States into a German settlement, trying to get Japan and Mexico to make war on us, and all the rest. He even made her admit there was proof they mean to conquer us when they get through with the others, and that they've set out to rule the world for their own benefit, and make whoever else they kindly allow to live, to work for them.
"She said it might be true, but since nothing at all could be a right cause for war, than all this couldn't be a cause of war. Of course she had her regular pacifist 'logic' working; she said that since war is the worst thing there is, why, all other evils were lesser, and a lesser evil can't be a just cause for a greater. She got terribly excited, they say, but kept right on, anyway. She said war was murder and there couldn't be any other way to look at it; and she'd heard there was already talk in the university of students thinking about enlisting, and whoever did such a thing was virtualy enlisting to return murder for murder. Then Joe Stansbury asked her if she meant that she'd feel toward any student that enlisted the way she would toward a murderer, and she said, yes, she'd have a horror of any student that enlisted.
"Well, that broke up the class; Joe turned from her to the platform and told old Burney that he was responsible for allowing such talk in his lecture-room, and Joe said so far as ~he~ was concerned, he resigned from Burney's classes right there. That started it, and practically the whole class got up and walked out with Joe. They said Burney streaked off home, and Dora was left alone in there, with her head down on her desk--and I gues she certainly deserves it.
A good many have alread stopped speaking to her."
Ramsey fidgeted with a pen on the table by which he sat. "Well, I don't know," he said, slowly; "I don't know if they ought to do that exactly."
"Why oughtn't they?" Fred demanded, sharply.
"Well, it looks to me as if she was only fightin' for her principles.
She believes in 'em. The more it costs a person to stick to their principles, why, the more I believe the person must have something pretty fine about 'em likely."
Yes!" said the hot-headed Fred. "That may be in ordinary times, but not when a person's principles are liable to betray their country!
We won't stand that kind of principles, I tell you, and we oughtn't to. Dora Yocum's finding that out, all right. She had the biggest position of any girl in this place, or any boy either, up to the last few weeks, and there wasn't any student or hardly even a member of the faculty that had the influence or was more admired and looked up to. She had the whole show! But now, since she's just the same as called any student a murderer if he enlists to fight for his country and his flag--well, now she hasn't got anything at all, and if she keeps on she'll have even less!"
He paused in his walking to and fro and came to a halt behind his friend's chair, looking down compassionately upon the back of Ramsey's motionless head. His tone changed. "I guess it isn't just the ticket--me to be talking this way to you, is it?" he said, with a trace of huskiness.
"Oh--it's all right," Ramsey murmured, not altering his position.
"I can't help blowing up," Fred went on. "I want to say, though, I know I'm not very considerate to blow up about her to you this way.
I've been playing horse with you about her ever since freshman year, but--well, you must have understood, Ram, I never meant anything that would really bother you much, and I thought--well, I ~really~ thought it was a good thing, you--your--well, I mean about her, you know.
I'm on, all right. I know it's pretty serious with you." He paused.
Ramsey did not move, except that his right hand still fidgeted with the pen upon the table.
"Oh--well--" he said.
"It's--it's kind of tough luck!" his friend contrived to say; and he began to pace the floor again.
"Oh--well--"
"See here, ole stick-in-the-mud," Fred broke out abruptly. "After her saying what she did-- Well, it's none o' my business, but--but--"
"Well, what?" Ramsey murmured. "I don't care what you say, if you want to say anything."
"Well, I ~got~ to say it," Fred half groaned and half blurted.
"After she said ~that~--and she meant it--why, if I were in your place I'd be darned if I'd be seen out walking with her again."
