"If he has sent Vera Brennan 'The Story of an African Farm,' then she can't be the ordinary sort of girl," I thought. "She can't be of the great army of those who play games and are always taking bodily exercise, yet never by any chance do anything more useful than arrange cut flowers. He could have passed on his way among thousands of these without taking any notice of them. She must be a personality--one of the few girls who can think and are not afraid to do it; one of the few who know what real romance is and who, because they know this, will always be able to marry as often as they like, no matter how small the number of marriageable men may be, while other women stand around and gasp for a husband in vain. And if she is this--then he is not wholly and only mine now as he was a few weeks ago. He will never be wholly mine any more." "So we are in it. We are in the European Soup," I wrote to Little Yeogh Wough in his Officers' Training Corps camp at Aldershot, when war had been declared. But he was beside me before my letter could have reached him. "The War Office broke us up," he explained. "There was no room there any more for boys who were only playing at soldiering. But I'm going to do the real thing. I'm going to set about it to-morrow." "Yes," I told him, "you must go. It is the right thing for you to do." He looked at his father and heard from him again the same words, more emphatically repeated: "Yes. It's the right thing for you to do." He was very silent that evening, but it was very gaily and proudly that he set out next morning to fling himself into the sudden feverish activity of a certain garrison town not far away. "He won't be long getting his commission," his father said. "His five years in the Officers' Training Corps have taught him his work already." But at the end of that day, and at the end of many another day that followed, the Boy came back with a wistful disappointment written upon his handsome face. He always had the same story to tell--a story of having been welcomed and encouraged when he had first presented himself and promised all that his heart desired, so that only he passed the doctor's requirements. He had laughed at first at the bare idea of meeting with any difficulty in connection with the doctor. Those who had made him the promises had been quite confident, too, on this point. What could there be wrong with a splendid physique such as his? "And then I failed in the eyesight test," he finished up. "It is ridiculous, of course, that they should reject me for so little, because I don't have to wear glasses now for anything, and no ordinary person would know there was anything wrong with my eyes at all. I wonder if this sort of thing is going to keep on repeating itself? One or two of the officers suggested another doctor, but I suppose that as long as that wretched test board is put up and they find I can't read the small type on it at a given distance, one doctor will be the same as another."