ery chaps--! They made me
feel like a six-pound shell in a big turret magazine. Any one of them
could talk the eye out of my head the best day I'd ever seen. And the
day I came back to her wasn't the best day I'd ever seen--not for
talking purposes. I looked at and listened to them, and kept saying to
myself: 'I wonder if they realize what a lucky lot they are to be able
to stay all the time around where civilized women live?' But I don't
believe they did. They took everything as if 'twas no more than
small-arms ammunition was being served out to them.

"In my room in the hotel that night I began to chart a few new courses
for myself. Before I left for the East Doris was terribly young and
there'd been no other war heroes hanging around. She and her mother were
then living in a quiet hotel near my house while her father was off on
some board mission in the West. But now it wasn't any isolated little
country hotel. It was post quarters, with her father the commandant, and
a parade of young army officers in and out of those quarters, with
squadrons of two and three-stripers steaming over pretty regularly from
the navy-yard across the bay. And she was two years older--a terrible
advance, eighteen to twenty, and I'd been two years gone.

"You said a while ago, Carlin, 'What a kid you are!' and perhaps I am,
though I think I'm an old, old party myself; but about the time I came
back from the East that first time I must have been a good deal of a
kid. I know now I was. That first night at the hotel, after I'd been to
the fort all day, I talked to myself in good shape. And I wound up by
saying: 'Well, what do you care? There are forty nice girls between this
hotel and the post.' But there weren't forty. There were a hundred, as
far as that went, but there was only one that I wanted to see coming
over the side of my ship, and next day when I went to see that one again
I set out to win her. And I'm not going to give you any history of the
courtship of Doris. I couldn't tell it right if I wanted to, and I don't
want to--it's our own private story, but she wasn't trifling when she
told me she'd never forget me before I went East. In a week it all came
back, and once more we were walking under tall pines and sailing in a
beautiful bay. In another week it was as when I left her--I had hopes.

"And then came the morning of the last day of my leave, and as an ensign
doesn't rate any shore duty I knew that next day it would have to be