I agreed with her in that but there were some things that I knew would not happen to Jack. His breakfast, for instance, would not be particularly cooked for him, and he might take or leave exactly what was prepared for every one else. Neither would the Government cook come out and sit beside Jack while he was at breakfast and tempt him to eat, as his mother had always done. I knew, too, that at other meals, while the food would be abundant, it would usually be rather coarse, always plain, and there would be nothing very tempting about it unless you had your appetite with you. If ever there is a place where appetite is the best sauce, it is surely where one is served with army food. I need scarcely tell what actually happened to Jack, for it was exactly what happened to a good many Jacks whose mothers were equally afraid of the effects of camp life on them. Amid the temptations of home food, Jack had remained persistently underweight. Eating an army ration with the sauce of appetite due to prolonged physical efforts in the outdoor {63} air every day, Jack gained more than twenty pounds in weight, in spite of the supposedly insalubrious climate of the Border and the difficult conditions under which he had to live. It was literally the best summer vacation that Jack had ever spent, though if the suggestion had ever been made that this was the sort of summer vacation that would do him good, the idea would have been scoffed at as impractical, if not absolutely impossible. Homer suggested that a mollycoddle character whom he introduces into the "Iliad" owed something of his lack of manly stamina to the fact that he had six sisters at home, and an Irish friend once translated the passage by saying that the young man in question was "one of seven sisters." This had been something of Jack's trouble. He had been asked always whether he changed his underwear at the different seasons, whether he wore the wristlets that sisterly care provided for him, whether he put on his rubbers when he went out in damp weather and carried his umbrella when it was threatening rain, and all the rest. He got away from all this sympathetic solicitude in army life and was ever so much better for it.