retired to Aunt Emma's for
the evening. When she returned she expected to find Carl as repentant
as herself. Unfortunately that same Carl who had declared that it was
pure egotism to regard one's own religion or country as necessarily
sacred, regarded his own friends as sacred--a noble faith which is an
important cause of political graft. He was ramping about the
living-room, waiting for a fight--and he got it.

Their moment of indiscretion. The inevitable time when, believing
themselves fearlessly frank, they exaggerated every memory of an
injury. Ruth pointed out that Carl had disliked Florence Crewden as
much as she had disliked Martin. She renewed her accusation that he
was vacillating; scoffed at Walter MacMonnies (whom she really liked),
Gertie Cowles (whom she had never met), and even, hesitatingly, Carl's
farmer relatives.

And Carl was equally unpleasant. At her last thrust he called her a
thin-blooded New-Yorker and slammed his bedroom door. They had broken
their pledge not to go to bed on a quarrel.

He was gone before she came out to breakfast in the morning.

In the evening they were perilously polite again. Martin Dockerill
appeared and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind
had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she
could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks
wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the
British Aero Corps, to get life's supreme sensation--scouting ten
thousand feet in air, while dozens of batteries fired at him; a
nose-to-earth volplane. The thinking Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth
knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer--and as one who was not
merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured. And Martin
Dockerill seemed so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might
go.

Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter-of-fact chatter about
a kind of wandering which shut her out as completely as did the
project of war. "I don't know," said he, "but what the biggest fun in
chasing round the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where
you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of
greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a hand-out and sneak on a
blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every
brakie and constabule out after you. That's living!"

When Martin was gone Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended
to b