don't leave
your wife alone in a city throbbing with the fevered excitement and
uncertainty of war, where every one's motto is a short life and a
merry one! Not if she's young and hot-blooded, if she has grown so
accustomed to affection and caresses that the want of them afflicts
her with a thirst like that of a man lost in a desert. Because if she
has nothing to do but live from day to day on memories and hopes,
there will be a time when some man at hand will obscure the figure of
the absent one. That is all that happened to me, Robin. I longed for
you. Then I began to resent your complete absorption by the war
machine. Then you got dim, like the figure of a man walking away down
a long road. Do you remember how it was? Leave once in six months or
so. A kiss of welcome and a good-by right on its heels. There were
thousands like me in London. The war took our men--but took no account
of us. We were untrained. There were no jobs to occupy our hands--none
we could put our hearts into--none that could be gotten without
influence in the proper quarters. We couldn't pose successfully enough
to persuade ourselves that it was a glorious game. They had taken our
men, and there was nothing much left. We did not have to earn our
keep. If you had only not stuck so closely to the front lines."

"I had to," Hollister said sharply. "I had no choice. The country----"

"The country! That shadowy phantasm--that recruiting sergeant's
plea--that political abstraction that is flung in one's face along
with other platitudes from every platform," Myra broke out
passionately. "What does it really mean? What did it mean to us? Men
going out to die. Women at home crying, eating their hearts out with
loneliness, going bad now and then in recklessness, in desperation.
Army contractors getting rich. Ammunition manufacturers getting rich.
Transportation companies paying hundred per cent. dividends. One
nation grabbing for territory here, another there. Talk of saving the
world for democracy and in the same breath throttling liberty of
speech and action in every corner of the world. And now that it's all
over, everything is the same, only worse. The rich are richer and the
poor poorer, and there are some new national boundaries and some
blasted military and political reputations. That's all. What was that
to you and me? Nothing. Less than nothing. Yet it tore our lives up by
the roots. It took away from us something we had that we valued,
somethi