ry it there.

Instead of going to Oakmont, consequently, he spent a Sunday at
Princeton, vastly amused at the pacifist Bailly. Minute by minute the
attenuated tutor cursed his inability to take up a gun and pop at
Germans, interspersing his regrets with:

"But of course war is dreadful. It is inconceivable in a healthy
brain----" and so forth.

He had found a substitute for his chief ambition. He was throwing
himself heart and soul into the efforts of the Y.M.C.A. to keep soldiers
amused and fed.

"For Princeton," he explained, "has become an armed camp, a mill to
manufacture officers; nothing more. The classics are as defunct as
Homer. I had almost made a bad pun by suggesting that of them all
Martial alone survives."

Before he left, George was sorry he had come, for Lambert took pains to
leave Betty alone with him as they walked Sunday evening by the lake.
More powerful than Lambert's wishes in his mind was the memory of how
Betty and he had skated here, or come to boat races, or walked like this
in his undergraduate days; and she didn't take kindly to his
interference, letting him see that to her mind a marriage with Lambert
now would be too eager a jump into the house of Planter; too
inconsiderate a request for the key to the Planter coffers.

"For Lambert may not come back," she said.

"That's just it," he urged, unwillingly. "Why not take what you can be
sure of?"

"What difference would it make?" she asked. "Would I love Lambert any
more? Would he love me any more?"

"I think so," he said.

She shook her head.

"But the thought of a wife might make a difference at the front; might
make him hesitate, or give a little less. We all have to give
everything. So I give Lambert--entirely--if I have to."

George didn't try to say any more, for he knew she was right; yet with
the opening of Camp Upton and the birth of the division the rather
abrupt marriages of soldiers multiplied. During the winter Officers'
House sheltered excited conferences that led to Riverhead where
licenses, clergymen, and justices of the peace could be found; and there
was scarcely a week-end that didn't see the culmination in town of a
romance among George's own friends and acquaintances.

The week-ends he got were chiefly valuable to him because they offered
chances of seeing Sylvia. Few actually developed, however, for there
were not many general parties, since men preferred to cling, not
publicly, during such brief respites