“Stupidity, you mean,” remarked his host. “A man ought to know when he has had enough, whether it’s work or beer. But it’s not easy to stand aside when all the lucky people—like you—are playing the real game. At best, mine was only an imitation.” “I don’t agree with you,” Wally said, warmly. “We can’t all fight—the rest of the country has to carry on.” “Oh, well, there are enough slackers and shirkers to do that,” O’Neill said. “And anyhow, I couldn’t even carry on at what I did attempt to do. Never mind—tell me your own adventures.” Wally’s story of war did not take long in the telling; but he spun it out as much as possible, switching from war to Australia in response to the eager questions of the man in the big leather chair. John O’Neill was a curious blending: at one moment almost savagely cynical and despondent, as his own physical handicap weighed upon him: at the next, laughing like a boy, and full of a boy’s keen interest in what he had not seen. Australian talk held him closely attentive: it was almost the only corner of the world that he had not visited, but he meant to go there, he said, after the war. Travelling by sea was unpleasant enough at any time without the added chance of an impromptu ducking if a submarine or a mine came across you. “Do they all buck—your horses?” he asked. “I can ride a bit, but a buckjumper would be beyond me.” Wally reassured him as to the manners of Australian steeds. “There’s a general impression in England that we all live in red shirts, in the bush, and ride fiery, untamed steeds,” said he, laughing. “It goes with the universal belief that all Australia is tropical. I’ve tried to tell fellows in England that there are parts of Australia where we have a pretty decent imitation of Swiss winter sports—skiing, skating, and all the rest of it; but they look on me with polite disbelief. They can’t—or won’t—understand that Australia stretches over enough of the map to have a dozen different kinds of climate. Not that it matters, anyhow; I don’t think we expect people to be wildly interested in us.” “We’ll know more about you by the time the war is over,” his host suggested. “Well—I suppose so. Lots of our fellows will come to London; we’re all awfully keen to see it, and it’s a great chance for us. I only hope we shall take a lot of your men back with us; they’re falling over each other in England—or will be, once the war is over: and we want them. We needed them badly enough before the war: afterwards it will be worse than ever.” “Don’t you preach emigration in Ireland,” said O’Neill, laughing.