overwork had hold of him. He was glad to
have her desert him for an evening now and then and go out to the
Peace Waters Country Club for a dance with Phil and Olive Dunleavy.
She felt guilty when she came home and found him still making
calculations. But she hummed waltzes while she put on a thin, blue
silk dressing-gown and took down her hair.

"I _can't_ stand this grubby, shut-in prison," she finally snapped at
him, on an evening when he would not go to the first night of a
roof-garden.

He snarled back: "You don't have to! Why don't you go with your
bloomin' Phil and Olive? Of course, I don't ever want to go myself!"

"See here, my friend, you have been taking advantage for a long time
now of the fact that you were ill. I'm not going to be your nurse
indefinitely." She slammed her bedroom door.

Later she came stalking out, very dignified, and left the flat. He
pretended not to see her. But as soon as the elevator door had clanged
and the rumbling old car had begun to carry her down, away from him,
the flat was noisy with her absence. She came home eagerly sorry--to
find an eagerly sorry Carl. Then, while they cried together, and he
kissed her lips, they made a compact that no matter for what reason
or through whose fault they might quarrel, they would always settle it
before either went to bed.... But they were uncomfortably polite for
two days, and obviously were so afraid that they might quarrel that
they were both prepared to quarrel.

Carl had been back at work for less than one month, but he hoped that
the Touricar was giving enough promise now of positive success to
permit him to play during the evening. He rented a VanZile car for
part time; planned week-end trips; hoped they could spend----

Then the whole world exploded.

Just at the time when the investigation of Twilight Sleep indicated
that the world might become civilized, the Powers plunged into a war
whose reason no man has yet discovered. Carl read the head-lines on
the morning of August 5th, 1914, with a delusion of not reading
"news," but history, with himself in the history book.

Ten thousand books record the Great War, and how bitterly Europe
realized it; this is to record that Carl, like most of America, did
not comprehend it, even when recruits of the Kaiser marched down
Broadway with German and American flags intertwined, even when his
business was threatened. It was too big for his imagination.

Every noon he bought half a dozen