His One Woman by Paula Marshall Page B

railroads, and as fast as they build them we shall destroy them. No, Jack, they cannot win—particularly if the war is a long one.’
    â€˜Time will tell,’ Ezra said soberly. ‘It is worth remembering, though, that victory does not always go to the most powerful.’
    â€˜The thing I most fear,’ said the Senator, ‘is that, whoever wins, war will inevitably change and harden us.’
    Jack could not but agree with him. There was a ruthless determination beginning to show itself in the North and now that the war had begun it was becoming almost frightening in its intensity. The men pouring into Washington to make their fortunes in the war were hard-headed and single-minded in a way which his brother Alan understood but few others in Britain or Europe could or would.
    Alan had spoken to him of it shortly before he had left for New York. They’d been in Willard’s bar which had been more crowded and even rowdier than on the night in which Alan had shown his true colours.
    â€˜They are not aware back home of what lies ahead of us,’ he had said. ‘They don’t understand that the USA is Rome and that we are turning into Athens. The future is here. If I had come to the States twenty years ago, instead of England, this is where I should have been most at home. They are not civilised yet, and neither am I.’
    Jack had laughed at this, looking at his elegant brother, the very picture of an English aristocrat—but the picture lied.
    â€˜And I?’ he’d asked, for he intended to settle in the States. ‘Am I civilised?’
    â€˜More than I am,’ Alan had said judiciously, ‘but I have no doubt that you can make a good life here. Always provided, of course, that you choose the right wife. Avoid the little Sophie, Jack. She is for bedding, not wedding, and I would not even trust her in bed—unless she were tied down. Now the supposedly plain cousin—she is a different thing altogether. Sophie’s looks won’t last and once gone…’ He’d shrugged. ‘You are old enough to use your common sense.’
    â€˜You married a beauty, though,’ Jack had said, remembering the radiant Eleanor who had visited Sydney with Alan twenty years ago.
    â€˜But clever—’ Alan had smiled ‘—the best of her family. I hope that it was not only for her looks that I married her.’
    He’d embraced his brother fiercely. ‘Little brother, you are a good man, better than I am, and deserve well of life, but I warn you, beware of Sophie. I don’t like the way in which she looks at you and Marietta when you are together.’
    Jack had watched him go. He loved Alan and his brother Thomas. He thought how sad it was that their passion for living had spread them across the globe so that they rarely met.
    Well, he would be wary of Sophie, but he was sure that Alan was being a little too suspicious of her.
    Much later he was to remember what his brother had said, and to acknowledge that that master of deviousness had recognised another’s possession of it, and that he would have done well to take more heed of his warning.
    While he walked with Marietta beside the Potomac River, Sophie and Alan’s harsh judgement of her were far from his mind. They stopped to admire the Falls and the beautiful scenery surrounding them.
    â€˜Truly are they called the Great American,’ he said. ‘For once the name is not a polite fiction.’
    â€˜Oh, everything is larger than life with us,’ Marietta said, smiling. She was wearing a pale green cotton dress and a large straw hat and her hair was soft about her face because she knew that Jack liked it that way. ‘European visitors often complain that we are great boasters—but once they see what we are supposedly boasting of and how truly magnificent it is…’ and she left the sentence unfinished.
    Jack did not argue with her: for one thing he was