needed in the chaotic world without. But army men lacked
perspective; in isolation they had lost their sense of proportion, of
relationships. They had not a true vision of themselves as part of a
whole. They had, on the other hand, unconsciously fallen into the way of
assuming the whole existed for the part, that they were larger than the
thing they were meant to serve. Their whole scale was so proportioned;
their whole sense of adjustment so perverted.

They lacked flexibility--openness--all-sides-aroundness.

Life in the army disciplined one in many things valuable in life. It
failed in giving a true sense of the values of life.

He could not have said why it was those inflated proportions irritated
him so. They lent an unreality to everything. They made for false
standards. And more and more the thing which mattered to him was reality.

He tried to pull away from the things that thought would lure him into.
He had not the courage to let himself think of her tonight.

He feared he had not increased his popularity in the last few days. At a
dinner the night before a colonel had put an end to a discussion on war,
in which several of the younger officers showed dangerous symptoms of
hospitality to the civilian point of view, with the pious pronouncement:
"War was ordained by God."

"But man pays the war tax," he had not been able to resist adding, and
the Colonel had not joined in the laugh.

He found it wearisome the way the army remained so smug in its assumption
that God stood right behind it. When worsted on economic grounds--and
perhaps driven also from "survival of the fittest" shelter--a pompous
retreat could always be effected to divinity.

It was that same colonel who, earlier in the evening, had thus ended a
discussion on the unemployed. "The poor ye have always with you," said
the Colonel, delicately smacking his lips over his champagne and gently
turning the conversation to the safer topic of high explosives.

He turned impatiently from thought of it to the men and women far down
below. He was always looking now at crowds of men and women, always
hoping for a familiar figure in those crowds.

With all the baffling unreality there had been around her, she seemed to
express reality. She made him want it. She made him want life. Made him
feel what he was missing--realize what he had never had.

It seemed that if he did not find her he would not find life.

She, too, had wanted life. Her quest had be