Burned Bridges

Always when that queer, semi-dormant tribe instinct suggested that he go

fight with the tribe against the tribal enemy his reason swiftly choked

the impulse. He would not fight for a political abstraction. He had read

history. It is littered with broken treaties. If he fought it would be

because he felt there was need to strike a blow for something righteous.

And his faith in the righteousness of the Allied cause was still

unfired. He saw no mission to compel justice, to exact retribution, only

a clash of Great Powers, in which the common man was fed to the roaring

guns.

But he was not so obtuse as to fail of seeing the near future. The

Germans were proving a right hard nut to crack. It might

be--remotely--that a man would have no choice in the matter of fighting.

He saw that cloud on the horizon. Sometimes he wished that he could

muster up a genuine enthusiasm for this business of war. He saw men who

had it and wondered privately how they came by it.

If he could have felt it an imperative duty laid upon him, that would

have settled certain matters out of hand. Chief among these would have

been the problem of Sophie Carr.

Sophie eluded and mystified him. Not wholly in a physical

sense--although, to be exact, she did become less accessible in a purely

physical sense. But it went deeper than that. During the eighteen months

following Thompson's motor-sales début he never succeeded in

establishing between them the same sense of spiritual communion that he

had briefly glimpsed those few minutes in Carr's home on the way he

opened his salesroom.

There was Tommy, for instance. Tommy was far closer to Sophie Carr than

he, Thompson, could manage to come, no matter how he tried. He and Tommy

were friends. They had apartments in the same house. They saw each other

constantly. The matter of competition in business was purely nominal.

They were both too successful in business to be envious of each other in

that respect. But where Sophie Carr was concerned it was a conflict, no

less existent because neither man ever betrayed his consciousness of

such a conflict. Indeed Thompson sometimes wondered uneasily if Ashe's

serenity came from an understanding with her. But he doubted that. Tommy

had not won--yet. That intangible yet impenetrable wall which was rising

about Sophie was built of other, sterner stuff.

She seldom touched on the war, never more than a casual sentence or two.

Perhaps a phrase would flash like a sword, and then her lips would

close. Carr would discuss the war from any angle whatsoever, at any

time. It became an engrossing topic with him, as if there were phases

that puzzled him, upon which he desired light. He ceased to be

positive. But his daughter shunned war talk.