Kendall was disturbed. It was within his power to be sympathetic, to feel deeply, to know pain because another was suffering pain. He wished this subject had not arisen and he wanted to have it changed ... because the plight of the women—especially the young women, the marriageable girls of France—was making itself apparent to him. Millions of them, and no men to marry them! It was appalling. It was appalling that they should realize it, and the consequences of their realization were appalling.... Life was denied them; the fullness and beauty and the joys and sufferings of womanhood were denied them. He wondered, with his Middle-Western conscience, if one could really blame them for snatching what little minutes of living came in their way. He wondered if the conventional—in these terrible circumstances—could be the _right_. Would the morals of Plymouth Rock answer in this emergency?... And then came the inevitable question, What are morals?... His mother could not answer this question for him to his satisfaction, nor could his father—with all his father’s leniency. One had to see the thing to comprehend it, and neither of his parents had seen. For the first time he asked himself if the conventions, the cut-and-dried rules of living under which he had grown to manhood, really sprang, full-armed, from the will of Deity, or if they were evolved by expediency.... It was deep speculation for one of his equipment, and dangerous speculation for a young man set down as he was set down among manners strange and customs so divergent—and in such an emergency. He moved back his chair. “Let’s go in the other room,” he said, “and—and suppose we talk about something besides the war.” “It makes you sad?” Andree said, and looked at him with a strange expression of sympathy, of understanding—of—of something that made her seem nearer to him, less mysterious, more human than she had ever seemed before. “Come ... we shall talk awhile and then I must go to my house, because it is ver’ _nécessaire_ for me to lift up at an early hour.” Kendall laughed. “Lift up?...” The literal translation uttered so soberly was exquisitely funny, made more so by Andree’s solemn little face. “It is fonnee? For example! And what should one say?” “Get up,” said Ken. “It is not well.... I shall say lift up.” “You may say whatever you want to—_mignonne_,” he said, with a sudden access of tenderness. “_Mignonne!..._” She looked up at him and smiled timidly. “It is ver’ pretty—for you to call me so. It is ver’ well.”