told. It was still early then. He had yet in his pocket the note which he hadreceived by the hand of a small Negro boy just before noon, asking him to calland see her — the quaint, stiffly formal request which was actually a summons,out of another world almost — the queer archaic sheet of ancient good notepaperwritten over with the neat faded cramped script which, due to his astonishmentat the request from a woman three times his age and whom he had known all hislife without having exchanged a hundred words with her or perhaps to the factthat he was only twenty years old, he did not recognize as revealing acharacter cold, implacable, and even ruthless. He obeyed it immediately afterthe noon meal, walking the half mile between his home and hers through the drydusty heat of early September and so into the house. It too was somehow smallerthan its actual size — it was of two storeys — unpainted and a little shabby, yetwith an air, a quality of grim endurance as though like her it had been createdto fit into and complement a world in all ways a little smaller than the one inwhich it found itself. There in the gloom of the shuttered hallway whose airwas even hotter than outside, as if there were prisoned in it like in a tomball the suspiration of slow heatladen time which had recurred during theforty-five years, the small figure in black which did not even rustle, the wantriangle of lace at wrists and throat, the dim face looking at him with anexpression speculative, urgent, and intent, waited to invite him in.

It'sbecause she wants it told, he thought, so that people whom she will never seeand whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seenher face will read it and know at last why God let us lose the war: that onlythrough the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He slay thisdemon and efface his name and lineage from the earth. Then almost immediatelyhe decided that neither was this the reason why she had sent the note, and