She would lunch with Davidge to-morrow, tell him her plan, bid him farewell, go to Baltimore, learn Nicky's secret, thwart it one way or another--and then set about her destiny. She abhorred the relapse so utterly that she wept. The warm tears refreshed her eyes before they froze on her cheeks, and she fell asleep in the blissful assurance of a martyrdom. CHAPTER IV The next morning Mamise woke in her self-warmed bed, at the nudge of a colored maid bundled up like an Eskimo, who carried a breakfast-tray in mittened hands. Mamise said: "Oh, good morning, Martha. I'll bathe before breakfast if you'll turn on the hot water, please." "Hot water? Humph! Pipes done froze last night, an' bus' loose this mo'nin', and fill the kitchen range with water an' bus' loose again. No plumber here yit. Made this breakfuss on the gas-stove. That's half-froze, tew. I tell you, ma'am, you're lucky to git your coffee nohow. Better take it before it freezes, tew." Mamise sighed and glanced at the clock. The reproachful hands stood at eleven-thirty. "Did the clock freeze, too? That can't be the right time!" "Yessum, that's the raht tahm." "Great heavens!" "Yes, ma'am." Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and breakfasted with speed. She dressed with all the agility she could muster. She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all. In modern history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the least for the heroine--even such a dubious heroine as Mamise--to have a bathless day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles they get at least two baths a day: one heroic cold shower in the morning and one hot tub in the late afternoon before getting into the faultless evening attire. This does not apply to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for they never bathe. ("Why should they," my wife puts in, "since they're going to commit suicide, anyway?") But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity, that the very politest people came to know the old-fashioned luxury of an extra-dry life. There was a time when cleanliness was accounted as ungodliness and the Christian saints anathematized the bath as an Oriental pollution. During our war of wars there was a vast amount of helpless holy living. Exquisite gentlemen kept to their clothes for weeks at a time and grew rancid and lousy among the rats that were foul enough to share their stinking dens with them. If these gentlemen were wounded, perchance, they added stale blood, putrefaction, and offal to their abominable fetor. And women who had been pretty and soapy and without smell, and who had once blanched with shame at the least maculation, lived with these slovenly men and vermin and dead horses and old dead soldiers and shared their glorious loathsomeness.