cks for Charlie Sands that he'd have had to be a
centipede to wear 'em all, instead of----"

"Tish," Aggie said in a shivering voice, "I wish you wouldn't talk about
it. I can't bear it, that's all. It sets me shivering."

Tish eyed her coldly. "The body is entirely controlled by the mind,
Aggie," she reminded her. "And when I remember how nearly your lack of
control cost us our lives, when you insisted on sneezing----"

"Insisted! If you had been in a shell hole full of water up to your
neck, Tish Carberry----"

"The difference between you and me, Aggie," Tish replied calmly, "is
that I should not have been in a shell hole full of water up to my
neck." The war was over then, of course, but there was still a disturbed
condition in certain countries, and Tish's eyes grew reflective.

"I see they are thinking of sending a real army into Russia," she said
thoughtfully. "I suppose that Russian laundress of the Ostermaiers'
could teach a body to talk enough to get about with."

Shortly after that Aggie disappeared, and I found her later on in Tish's
bathroom crying into a Turkish towel.

"I won't go, Lizzie," she said, "and that's flat! I've done my share,
and if Tish Carberry thinks I am going to go through the rest of my life
falling into shell holes and being potted at by all sort of strange men
she can just think again. Besides that, I have been true to the memory
of one man for a good many years, and I simply refuse to be kissed by
any more of those immoral foreigners."

Aggie had in her youth been betrothed to a gentleman in the roofing
business, who had met with an unfortunate accident, owing to having
slipped on a tin gutter, without overshoes, one rainy day; and it is
quite true that we had all been kissed by two French generals and a man
in civilian clothes who had not even been introduced to us. But up to
that time we had kept the osculatory incident a profound secret.

"Aggie," I said with sudden suspicion, "you haven't told Mrs. Ostermaier
about that affair, have you?"

Aggie put down the towel and looked at me defiantly.

"I have, Lizzie," she said. "Not all of it, but some. She said she had
gone to the moving pictures with the youngest girl, but that she had
been obliged to take her away before it was over, owing to a picture
from France of Tish's being kissed by a French general. She said that as
soon as he had kissed her on one cheek she turned the other, and that
she thinks the effect on Dolores