would be useless on both sides. He thinks so. So do I. He is one of
the men to serve his country on the best field we can choose for him. In
a ship's cabin he is thrown away. Ay, ay, War, and he may go aboard.
But now we must have him ashore. Too few of such as he!'

'It is matter of opinion,' said Rosamund, very tightly compressed;
scarcely knowing what she said.

How strange, besides hateful, it was to her to hear her darling spoken
of by a stranger who not only pretended to appreciate but to possess him!
A stranger, a man of evil, with monstrous ideas! A terribly strong
inexhaustible man, of a magical power too; or would he otherwise have won
such a mastery over Nevil?

Of course she could have shot a rejoinder, to confute him with all the
force of her indignation, save that the words were tumbling about in her
head like a world in disruption, which made her feel a weakness at the
same time that she gloated on her capacity, as though she had an enormous
army, quite overwhelming if it could but be got to move in advance. This
very common condition of the silent-stricken, unused in dialectics,
heightened Rosamund's disgust by causing her to suppose that Nevil had
been similarly silenced, in his case vanquished, captured, ruined; and he
dwindled in her estimation for a moment or two. She felt that among a
sisterhood of gossips she would soon have found her voice, and struck
down the demagogue's audacious sophisms: not that they affected her in
the slightest degree for her own sake.

Shrapnel might think what he liked, and say what he liked, as far as she
was concerned, apart from the man she loved. Rosamund went through these
emotions altogether on Nevil's behalf, and longed for her affirmatizing