"Oh, I see!" said Marjorie, looking a little embarrassed. "People often look surprised when I forget, and do it on the street. I think about things, and then when they seem funny to me I laugh. Don't you ever have thoughts all by yourself that you laugh over, when you're alone?" Francis shook his head. He had a good mind, and a quick one, but he did not use it as something to amuse himself with, as Marjorie did with hers. He used it to work with. "I beg your pardon for startling you," he said. "But----" "I know. It looked queer. I was just thinking how different everybody and everything is since the war. We're all so much more grown up, and responsible. And I was hearing myself talk to Lucille's grandchildren, and tell them all about the days before the war, when everybody said they just didn't care. . . . Aren't things different?" Francis nodded. "Yes, they're different. I don't know exactly how, but they are. And we are." "Do you think you are?" Francis sat down on the couch, looked at her, bright-eyed and grave, and nodded again. "Yes. All the values are changed. At least they are for me and most of the men I came across. I don't think the women are so different; you see, the American women didn't have anything much to change them, except the ones who went over. We were in such a little while it didn't have time to go deep." He meant no disparagement, but Marjorie flared up. "You mean me--and Lucille--and all the rest!" she accused him. "You're quite wrong. That was just what I was telling Lucille's grandchildren. We are different. Why, do you think I would have thought I owed you anything--owed it to you to stay up here and drudge--before the war? I never thought about being good, particularly, or honorable, or owing things to people. Oh, I suppose I did, in a way, because I'd always been brought up to play fair. But never with the top of my mind. You know yourself, all anybody wanted was a good time. If anybody had told me, when I was seventeen--I was seventeen when the war started, wasn't I?--that I'd care more about standards than about fun, I'd have just thought they were lying, or they didn't know. And right and wrong have come to matter in the most curious way." "I think perhaps," he answered her--they had quite forgotten that they were enemies by now--"that the war was in the air. Maybe the world felt that there wouldn't be much chance for good times for it--for our generation--again, and snatched at it. You know, for a good many years things won't be the same, even for us in America, who suffered less, perhaps, than any other nation in the world. Life's harder, and it will be."