His cigarette discarded and curling up in a little column of smoke between them, he sat regarding her, a heave surge of red rising above the impeccable white of his collar into the roots of his hair. It was as if her denouncement had come down in a welt across his face. "Nobody ever--nobody ever dared to talk like this to me before. Nobody ever dared to call me a coward. Nobody. Because it ain't so!" "I know it ain't, Hal. If it was could I have been so strong for you all these months? I knew the way you showed yourself in the Fifty-fifth Street fire. I read about it in the papers before I ever knew you. I--I know the way you mauled Ed Stein, twice your size, the night he tried to--to get fresh with me. I know you ain't a slacker in your heart, Hal, but I--I couldn't marry a man that got fake exemption. Couldn't, no matter how it broke my heart to see him go marching off! Couldn't! Couldn't!" "That's what it means, Blossum--marching off!" "I know it, but how--how could I marry a man that wasn't fit to war his country's uniform even in a show. I--I couldn't marry a man like that if it meant the solid gold suite in the solid goldest hotel in this town. I couldn't marry a--a fake khaki-boy!" "Ain't there no limit, Bloss, to the way you can make a fellow feel like dirt under your feet? My God! ain't there no limit?" "There--there's nothing on earth can make a man of you, Hal, nothing on God's earth but War! Every once in a while there's some little reason seems to spring up for there bein' a war. You're one of them reasons, Hal. Down in my heart I know it that you'll come back, and when I get a hunch it's a hunch! Down in my heart I know it, dear, that you'll come back to me. But you'll come back a man, you'll come back with the yellow streak pure gold, you'll-you'll come back to me pure gold, dear. I know it. I know it." His head was back as if his throat were open to the stroke of her words, but there was that growing in his face which was enormous, translucent, even apogean. He tore up the paper between them, slowly, and in criss crosses. "And you, Blossom?" he said, not taking his eyes, with their growing lights, off her. "Why, I'll be waiting, Hal," she said, the pink coming out to flood her face, "I'll be waiting--Sweetheart." [signed] Fannie Hurst The Married Slacker [This is a comic strip in three panels. I'll do my best to describe each panel and then put the text which comes beneath the panel.] [Panel 1: A man and woman sit at a meal with pictures of Washington and Lincoln glowering from the wall in the man's full view behind the woman. The woman is reading a paper. The man is listening, but not looking at the woman, rather at his meal in front of him. A maid brings coffee cups on a platter.]