Back in the old days at the sanitarium she had felt herself bound only to the problems and emergencies of war. It had never occurred to her then that in an incredibly short time she would be bothering about matters of adjustment afterward. With peace already on the horizon, she was troubled a hundredfold more than she had been when indefinite war was the promise for the future. From the beginning she had marveled at the buoyancy and optimism of the men who were focusing their lives within the limits of each day. Many of them never thought in terms of more than twenty-four hours; often it was less. They had learned the knack of intensive living. World-old truths were flashed into their minds like spot-lights; friends were made and lost in a few hours; eternity was visioned and compassed in a minute. The last words Jerry Donoghue of Ward 7-A had said before he went west came back to Sheila with a curious persistence. "When all's said and done, miss, it's been a grand life--Brave lads for comrades--a lass who kept faith to the end--a good fight an' somethin' good to fight for--Near five years of it--wi' perdition grinnin' ye in the face an' the Holy Mother walkin' at your back--Sure, I might ha' lived fifty year in Letterkenny an' never tasted life half so plentiful--or--so--sweet." That was the strange part of it; they had all found life "plentiful an' sweet"--nurses, surgeons, soldiers alike. They might be homesick, worn out with the business of fighting and patching up afterward, eternally aching in body and heart with the long stretches of horror and work with little sleep and less food, and yet not a handful out of every thousand of them would have chosen to quit if they could. But when the quitting-time came, when war was over, what was going to happen then? Sheila wondered it about the boys who lay unconscious on their stretchers, packed in the room about her. She wondered it about the boys conscious in their cots below. Most of all she wondered it about Ward 7-A. It was going to hurt so many to have to look beyond the immediate day into a procession of numberless days stretching into years and years. The sudden relaxing from big efforts to little ones, that would hurt, too, like the uncramping of over-strained muscles. And the being thrown back on oneself to think, to act, to feel for oneself again--what of that? It was like dismembering a gigantic machine and scattering the infinitesimal parts of it broadcast over the earth to function alone. Only many of the parts would be imperfect, and all would have souls to reckon with.