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Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946

"Ramsey Milholland"


"What is it?"
He made a great struggle. "I'm not influencing Fred not to go," he said.
"I--don't want you to trust me to do anything like that."
"What?"
"I think it's all right for him to go, if he wants to," Ramsey said,
miserably.
"You do? For him to go to _fight?_"
He swallowed. "Yes."
"_Oh!_" she cried, turned even redder than he, and ran up the stone
steps. But before the storm doors closed upon her she looked down to
where he stood, with his eyes still lowered, a lonely-seeming figure,
upon the pavement below. Her voice caught upon a sob as she spoke.
"If you feel like that, you might as well go and enlist, yourself," she
said, bitterly. "I can't--I couldn't--speak to you again after this!"


Chapter XIX
It was easy enough for him to evade Fred Mitchell's rallyings these
days; the sprig's mood was truculent, not toward his roommate but toward
Congress, which was less in fiery haste than he to be definitely at war
with Germany. All through the university the change had come: athletics,
in other years spotlighted at the centre of the stage, languished
suddenly, threatened with abandonment; students working for senior
honours forgot them; everything was forgotten except that growing
thunder in the soil.


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