e other. Claude put something
into it--anything to be rid of him.

Victor was standing before the fireplace. "Hello, Wheeler, come
in. Our dinner will be served up here. It's big enough, isn't it?
I could get nothing between a coop, and this at fifteen dollars a
day."

The room was spacious enough for a banquet; with two huge beds,
and great windows that swung in on hinges, like doors, and that
had certainly not been washed since before the war. The heavy red
cotton-brocade hangings and lace curtains were stiff with dust,
the thick carpet was strewn with cigarette-ends and matches.
Razor blades and "Khaki Comfort" boxes lay about on the dresser,
and former occupants had left their autographs in the dust on the
table. Officers slept there, and went away, and other officers
arrived,--and the room remained the same, like a wood in which
travellers camp for the night. The valet de chambre carried away
only what he could use; discarded shirts and socks and old shoes.
It seemed a rather dismal place to have a party.

When the waiter came, he dusted off the table with his apron and
put on a clean cloth, napkins, and glasses. Victor and his guest
sat down under an electric light bulb with a broken shade, around
which a silent halo of flies moved unceasingly. They did not
buzz, or dart aloft, or descend to try the soup, but hung there
in the center of the room as if they were a part of the lighting
system. The constant attendance of the waiter embarrassed Claude;
he felt as if he were being watched.

"By the way," said Victor while the soup plates were being
removed, "what do you think of this wine? It cost me thirty
francs the bottle."

"It tastes very good to me," Claude replied. "But then, it's the
first champagne I've ever drunk."

"Really?" Victor drank off another glass and sighed. "I envy you.
I wish I had it all to do over. Life's too short, you know."

"I should say you had made a good beginning. We're a long way
from Crystal Lake."

"Not far enough." His host reached across the table and filled
Claude's empty glass. "I sometimes waken up with the feeling I'm
back there. Or I have bad dreams, and find myself sitting on that
damned stool in the glass cage and can't make my books balance; I
hear the old man coughing in his private room, the way he coughs
when he's going to refuse a loan to some poor devil who needs it.
I've had a narrow escape, Wheeler; 'as a brand from the burning'.
That's all the Scripture