e cab, and stared contemplatively
out at New York going by. "And to think--and--to--think--that while
half of decent humanity has been doing what it's been doing to keep the
world from going to hell, that fool--that _fool_--has been sitting at
home nibbling toast and worrying about what is style! . . . I'll tell
him! Style is what I'll have when I get these clothes off, and some
regular ones. You'll have to help me pick 'em out, Marge. You'll find
I've no end of uses for a wife, darling."

"I hope you'll make me useful," she answered in a small voice.
Fortunately she saw the ridiculousness of what she had said herself
before the constrained note of her voice reached her husband, and
began, a little nervously, to laugh at herself. So that passed off all
right.

"Will life be just one succession of hoping things pass off all right?"
she wondered. And she did wish Francis wasn't so scornful about all
the things Logan said. For Logan, in spite of his mysterious
disability, was very brilliant; he wrote essays for real magazines that
you had to pay thirty-five cents for, and when Marjorie said she knew
him people were always very respectful and impressed. Marjorie had
been brought up to respect such things very much, herself, in a pretty
Westchester suburb, where celebrities were things which passed through
in clouds of glory, lecturing for quite as much as the club felt it
could afford. A celebrity who let you talk to him, nay, seemed
delighted when you let him talk to you, couldn't be as negligible as
Francis seemed to think him. . . . Francis didn't seem as if he had
ever read _anything_. . . . It was a harmless question to ask, at
least.

"What did you read, over there?" she asked him.

"We read anything we could get hold of that would take our minds," was
the answer, rather grimly. Then, more lightly, "When I wasn't reading
detective stories I was studying books on forestry. Did you know you
had married a forester bold, Marge?"

"Of course I remembered you said that was what you did," she answered,
relieved that the talk was veering away, for one moment, from
themselves.

"Poor little girl, you haven't had a chance to know very much about
me," he said tenderly. "Well, I know a lot more about it than I did
when I went away. Oh, the trees in France, dear! It's worse to think
of the trees than of the people, I think sometimes. I suppose that's
because they always meant a lot to me--very much as a j