g in, Peggy embraced him.

"Keep out of the way of shells and bullets as much as you can."

The Dean blew his nose, God-blessed him, and murmured something
incoherent about fighting for the glory of old England.

"Good luck," cried Peggy from the window.

She blew him a kiss. The taxi drove off, and Doggie went back into the
house with leaden feet. The meeting, which he had morbidly dreaded,
had brought him no comfort. It had not removed the invisible barrier
between Peggy and himself. But Peggy seemed so unconscious of it that
he began to wonder whether it only existed in his diseased
imagination. Though by his silences and reserves he had given her
cause for resentment and reproach, her attitude was nothing less than
angelic. He sat down moodily in an arm-chair, his hands deep in his
trousers pockets and his legs stretched out. The fault lay in himself,
he argued. What was the matter with him? He seemed to have lost all
human feeling, like the man with the stone heart in the old legend.
Otherwise, why had he felt no prick of jealousy at Peggy's admiring
comprehension of Oliver? Of course he loved her. Of course he wanted
to marry her when this nightmare was over. That went without saying.
But why couldn't he look to the glowing future? A poet had called a
lover's mistress "the lode-star of his one desire." That to him Peggy
ought to be. Lode-star. One desire. The words confused him. He had no
lode-star. His one desire was to be left alone. Without doubt he was
suffering from some process of moral petrifaction.

Doggie was no psychologist. He had never acquired the habit of turning
himself inside-out and gloating over the horrid spectacle. All his
life he had been a simple soul with simple motives and a simple though
possibly selfish standard to measure them. But now his soul was
knocked into a chaotic state of complexity, and his poor little
standards were no manner of use. He saw himself as in a glass darkly,
mystified by unknown change.

He rose, sighed, shook himself.

"I give it up," said he, and went to bed.

* * * * *

Doggie went to France; a France hitherto undreamed of, either by him
or by any young Englishman; a France clean swept and garnished for
war; a France, save for the ubiquitous English soldiery, of silent
towns and empty villages and deserted roads; a France of smiling
fields and sorrowful faces of women and drawn patient faces of old
men--and even then the