head and set his lips.

"It's not honest." He formed the words with his lips now, a summing up
of many thoughts in his brain. The brain went on elaborating the text.
"She thinks I'm brave; she thinks it's easy for me to face enlisting,
and the rest. She thinks I'm the makeup which can meet horror and
suffering light-heartedly. And I'm not. She admires me for that--she
said so. I'm not it. I'm fooling her; it's not honest. Yet"--he groaned
aloud. "Yet I may lose her if I tell her the truth. I'm afraid. I am. I
hate it. I can't bear--I can't bear to leave my job and my future, just
when it's opening out. But I could do that. Only I'm--Oh, damnation--I'm
afraid. Horror and danger, agony of men and horses, myself wounded
maybe, out on No Man's Land--left there--hours. To die like a dog. Oh,
my God--must I? If I tell it will break the little hold I have on her.
Must I go to this devil's dance that I hate--and give up her love
besides? But yet--it isn't honest to fool her. Oh, God, what will I do?"
People walking up State Street, meeting a sober-faced young man, glanced
at him with no particular interest. A woman waiting on a doorstep
regarded him idly.

"Why isn't he in uniform?" she wondered as one does wonder in these days
at a strong chap in mufti. Then she rebuked her thought. "Undoubtedly
there's a good reason; American boys are not slackers."

His slow steps carried him beyond her vision and casual thought. The
people in the street and the woman on the doorstep did not think or care
that what they saw was a man fighting his way through the crisis of his
life, fighting alone "per aspera ad astra--" through thorns to the
stars.

He lunched with a man at a club and after that took his way to the
building on Broadway where were the recruiting headquarters. He had told
her that he was going to enlist. As he walked he stared at the people in
the streets as a man might stare going to his execution. These people
went about their affairs, he considered, as if he--who was about to
die--did not, in passing their friendly commonplace, salute them. He did
salute them. Out of his troubled soul he sent a silent greeting to each
ordinary American hurrying along, each standing to him for pleasant and
peaceful America, America of all his days up to now. Was he to toss away
this comfortable comradeship, his life to be, everything he cared for on
earth, to go into hell, and likely never come back? Why? Why must he?
There seemed to be