somewhere Clay was hearing the guns, as she
was, and would find hope in them, and a future.

When a great burden is lifted, the relief is not always felt at once.
The galled places still ache. The sense of weight persists. And so with
Paris. Not at once did the city rejoice openly. It prayed first, and
then it counted the sore spots, and they were many. And it was dazed,
too. There had been no time to discount peace in advance.

The streets filled at once, but at first it was with a chastened people.
Audrey herself felt numb and unreal. She moved mechanically with the
shifting crowd, looking overhead as a captured German plane flew by,
trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. But by mid-day the sober note
of the crowds had risen to a higher pitch. A file of American doughboys,
led by a corporal with a tin trumpet and officered by a sergeant with
an enormous American cigar, goose-stepped down the Avenue de l'Opera,
gaining recruits at every step. It snake-danced madly through the crowd,
singing that one lyric stand-by of Young America: "Hail! hail! the
gang's all here!"

But the gang was not all there, and they knew it. Some of them lay in
the Argonne, or at Chateau-Thierry, and for them peace had come too
late. But the Americans, like the rest of the world, had put the past
behind them. Here was the present, the glorious present, and Paris on a
sunny Monday. And after that would be home.

"Hail, hail, the gang's all here,
What the hell do we care?
What the hell do we care?
Hail, hail, the gang's all here,
What the hell do we care now?"

Gradually the noise became uproarious. There were no bands in Paris, and
any school-boy with a tin horn or a toy drum could start a procession.
Bearded little poilus, arm in arm from curb to curb, marched grinning
down the center of the streets, capturing and kissing pretty midinettes,
or surrounding officers and dancing madly; Audrey saw an Algerian,
ragged and dirty from the battle-fields, kiss on both cheeks a portly
British Admiral of the fleet, and was herself kissed by a French sailor,
with extreme robustness and a slight tinge of vin ordinaire. She went on
smiling.

If only Clay were seeing all this! He had worked so hard. He had a right
to this wonderful hour, at least. If he had gone to the front, to see
Graham--but then it must be rather wonderful at the front, too. She
tried to visualize it; the guns quiet, and the strained look gone fro