Page:MacGrath--The drums of jeopardy.djvu/141



O UNDERSTAND Kitty at this moment one must be able to understand the Irish; and nobody does or can or will. Consider her twenty-four years, her corpuscular inheritance, the love of drama and the love of adventure. Imagine possessing sound ideas of life and the ability to apply them, and spiritually always galloping off on some broad highway—more often than not furnished by some engaging scoundrel of a novelist—and you will be able to construct a half tone of Kitty Conover.

That civilization might be actually on its deathbed, that positively half of the world was starving and dying and going mad through the reaction of the German blight touched her in a detached way. She felt sorry, dreadfully sorry, for the poor things; but as she could not help them she dismissed them from her thoughts every morning after she had read the paper, the way most of us do here in these United States. You cannot grapple with the misery of an unknown person several thousand miles away.

That which had taken place during the past twenty-four hours was to her a lark, a blindman's buff for grown-ups. It was not in her to tremble,