Kendall leaned far back in his car and smoked and found his thoughts disturbing company. He was not used to facing questions of big importance, but he saw now that for weeks he had been drifting toward a day when he would have to meet and reply to the first soul-modifying question that had ever been propounded to him.... The thing was inevitable. He was moving toward facts that could not be brushed aside.... Strangely enough, though he was heavy with apprehension, nevertheless there was a certain exultation.... This was living—living not in a circumscribed area, but in the unbounded world. This was _life_—this was _experience_—something big, worthy of the consideration of a man. There were happiness and misery in it.... He was beginning to see that he could not win through with happiness intact; it was his hope to win through with happiness preponderant.... The day he landed in France he had been a boy; less than two months had passed—and he had become a man.... France had done that for him. CHAPTER XII On the fourth evening after his departure from Paris Captain Ware stood at the entrance to the Metro on the Place de la Concorde, just across the road from the headquarters of the American Red Cross, waiting for Andree. At his left the Obelisk arose like a great needle; he could see the Metz and Strasburg statues green with wreaths, and beyond other pieces of sculpture deemed of sufficient artistic value to protect with sandbags from the menace of German bombs. Somehow this made him feel that he had not seen Paris, that it would be necessary for him to come back again when the base of the Vendôme Column should not be concealed by sand and concrete, when the carvings on the Arc de Triomphe should not be hidden under scaffoldings and stacked sandbags, when the once despised and criticized statue at the extreme right of the face of the Opéra—now the single piece of sculpture of all that adorned the building considered worth careful protection—should be exposed to view.