teered, "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. The present hysteria, the sentimentality he condemned, could not continue to stand before the pressure of mercantile necessity. After all, the entire country was not made up of fools.
Morice and his wife wandered off to the boardwalk, and he, August, must have fallen asleep, for he suddenly sat up with a sensation of strangeness and dizzy vision.
