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A strange, distracted feeling came over her, a sense of

potent unrealities

"Why would you want to go?"

"I should be doing soenuine It's a

sort of toy-life as it is"

"But ould you be doing if you went to war?"

"I would be er"

"But you'd only ain when the

araame"

"What is it?"

"It's about the "

A sense of hard separateness ca else?" she

asked

"You either kill or get killed--and I suppose it is

serious enough, killing"

"But when you're dead you don't matter any more," she

said

He was silenced for a moment

"But the result matters," he said "It matters whether we

settle the Mahdi or not"

"Not to you--nor me--we don't care about

Khartoum"

"You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make

room"

"But I don't want to live in the desert of Sahara--do

you?" she replied, laughing with antagonisot to back up those who do

"Why have we?"

"Where is the nation if we don't?"

"But we aren't the nation There are heaps of other people

who are the nation"