ng that we might have kept. It doesn't matter that you were
sincere, that you wanted to serve, that you thought it a worthy
service. The big people, the men who run things, they had no such
illusions; they had their eye on the main chance all the time. It paid
them--if not in money then in prestige and power. How has it paid you?
You know, every time you look in a mirror. You know that the men that
died were the lucky ones. The country that marched them to the front
with speeches and music when the guns were talking throws them on the
scrapheap when they come back maimed. I have no faith in a country
that takes so much and gives a little so grudgingly. I've learned to
think, Robin, and perhaps it has warped me a little. You have
suffered. So have I, partly because I was ignorant of the nature I was
born with, which you didn't understand and which I'm only myself
beginning to understand--but mostly because the seats of the mighty
were filled by fools and hypocrites seeking their own advantage. Oh,
life is a dreary business sometimes! We want so to be happy. We try so
hard. And mostly we fail."

Her eyes filled with tears, round drops that gathered slowly in the
corners of her puckered lids and spilled over the soft curves of her
cheek. She did not look at Hollister. She stared at the gray river.
She made a little gesture, as if she dumbly answered some futile
question, and her hands dropped idly into her lap.

"I feel guilty," she continued after a little, "not because I failed
to play up to the role of the faithful wife. I couldn't help that. But
I shouldn't have kept that money, I suppose. Still, you were dead.
Money meant nothing to you. It was in my hands and I needed it, or
thought I did. You must have had a hard time, Robin, coming back to
civil life a beggar."

"Yes, but not for lack of money," Hollister replied. "I didn't need
much and I had enough. It was being scarred so that everybody shunned
me. It was the horror of being alone, of finding men and women always
uneasy in my presence, always glad to get away from me. They acted as
if I were a monstrosity that offended them beyond endurance. I
couldn't blame them much. Sometimes it gave me the shivers to look at
myself in the glass. I am a horrible sight. People who must be around
me seem to get used to me, whether they like it or not. But at first I
nearly went mad. I had been uprooted and disfigured. Nobody wanted to
know me, to talk to me, to be friendly.