"No, you can't. The world was rocking and we over there were getting the full swing of it. It seemed that all the things we had considered so vital and fundamental didn't matter any more. Life didn't count. A city to-day was a brick-heap to-morrow. Night and day were all mixed up. Terror and work. Exhaustion and hysteria. A lot of us were girls--women, I mean--who had never known freedom. Not license--freedom. Ordinary freedom of will, or intellect, or action. Men, too, who had their noses to the grindstone for years. You know there's a lot more to war than just killing, and winning battles, and patching people up. It does something to you--something chemical and transforming--after you've been in it. The reaction isn't always noble. I'm just trying to explain what I mean. There were a lot of things going around--especially among the older and more severe looking of us girls. It's queer. There was one girl--she'd been a librarian in some little town up in Michigan. She told me once that there were certain books they kept in what they called 'The Inferno,' and only certain people could have them. They weren't on the shelves, for the boys and girls, or the general public. When she spoke of them she looked like a librarian. Her mouth made a thin straight line. You could picture her sitting in the library, at her desk, holding that pencil they use with a funny little rubber stamp thing attached to it, and refusing to allow some school-girl to take out 'Jennie Gerhardt.' She was discharged and sent home for being what they called promiscuous.... I just wanted you to know how things were.... He got three days' leave. Winnie Steppler was in Paris at the time. I was to try for leave--I'd have gone A. W. O. L. if I hadn't got it--and we three were to meet there. Winnie had a little two-room flat across the river. She'd been there for almost a year, you know. She made it her headquarters. The concierge knew me. When I got there Robert was waiting for me. Winnie had left a note. She had been called to Italy by her paper. I was to use her apartment. We stayed there together.... I'm not excusing it. There is no excuse. They were the happiest three days of my life--and always will be.... There are two kinds of men, you know, who make the best soldiers. The butcher-boy type with no nerves and no imagination. And the fine, high-strung type that fears battle and hates war and who whips himself into courage and heroism because he's afraid he'll be afraid.... He hated to go back, though he never said so.... He was killed ten days later.... I went to Switzerland for a while when.... Winnie was with me.... She was wonderful. I think I should have died without her.... I wanted to at first.... But not now. Not now." Stillness again. You heard only the child's breathing, gentle, rhythmical.