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46 trees there was a faint hush of disapproval. A year before, Sophy Wicks's airy indifference to the events that were agitating the world had amused some people and won the frank approval of others. She did not exasperate her friends by professions of pacifism, she simply declared that the war bored her; and after three years of vain tension, of effort in the void, something in the baffled American heart whispered that, things being as they were, she was perhaps right.

But now things were no longer as they had been. Looking back, Troy surveyed the gradual development of the war-feeling as it entered into a schoolboy's range of vision. He had begun to notice the change before the sinking of the Lusitania. Even in the early days, when his school-fellows had laughed at him and called him "Marny," some of them had listened to