n to these big,
coaxing, boisterous fellows; it was a joke to them; they didn't
know what it meant in the world. Behind them were shiploads of
money, and behind the ships....

The situation was unfair. Whether she took much or little out of
their hands, couldn't possibly matter to the Americans, couldn't
even dash their good humour. But there was a strain on the
cheesewoman, and the standards of a lifetime were in jeopardy.
Her mind mechanically fixed upon two-and-a-half; she would charge
them two-and-a-half times the market price of the cheese. With
this moral plank to cling to, she made change with conscientious
accuracy and did not keep a penny too much from anybody. Telling
them what big stupids they were, and that it was necessary to
learn to count in this world, she urged them out of her shop. She
liked them well enough, but she did not like to do business with
them. If she didn't take their money, the next one would. All the
same, fictitious values were distasteful to her, and made
everything seem flimsy and unsafe.

Standing in her doorway, she watched the brown band go ambling
down the street; as they passed in front of the old church of St.
Jacques, the two foremost stumbled on a sunken step that was
scarcely above the level of the pavement. She laughed aloud. They
looked back and waved to her. She replied with a smile that was
both friendly and angry. She liked them, but not the legend of
waste and prodigality that ran before them--and followed after.
It was superfluous and disintegrating in a world of hard facts.
An army in which the men had meat for breakfast, and ate more
every day than the French soldiers at the front got in a week!
Their moving kitchens and supply trains were the wonder of
France. Down below Arles, where her husband's sister had married,
on the desolate plain of the Crau, their tinned provisions were
piled like mountain ranges, under sheds and canvas. Nobody had
ever seen so much food before; coffee, milk, sugar, bacon, hams;
everything the world was famished for. They brought shiploads of
useless things, too. And useless people. Shiploads of women who
were not nurses; some said they came to dance with the officers,
so they would not be ennuyes.

All this was not war,--any more than having money thrust at you
by grown men who could not count, was business. It was an
invasion, like the other. The first destroyed material
possessions, and this threatened everybody's integrity. Distas