There was the key to his mother’s house in Fiftieth Street--a thick brass stubby affair that belonged to the door of a house where hardware was well understood. This key couldn’t be thrown away. Though it was practically unthinkable--a man might some time get home. It had been done. There was a key to 54 Harrow Street. The woman who ran the place had told him to keep it with him, because it was a symbol of something which he had professed at the time to understand. Then there was a long, old-fashioned inside door key, black and a little bent--the meanest of all to dig into a man’s hip--this to the hall door of certain rooms in the same Harrow Street house. Its duplicate was in the hands of a girl he used to know. She had said she would look in on the apartment while he was gone, but she was married now. No use keeping it any longer. He took it off the ring, but put it back again. Certain things were good, but hard to get. Brandy was good. Coffee was good, especially hot. Saddle-horse stew was good. Porkpie, pork and beans, pork sausage and pancakes were reasonable and of good report, but keys on key rings that gored a man while he rode or slept, and stretched back into meanings of the Utterly Absurd that a man couldn’t get straight in Paris, much less in this slaughterhouse of the Western Front--keys on key rings were sheer perversities, especially when a man wasn’t game to toss them into any one of these open sewers.... They were saying at home that his stuff was blurred and unconvincing. Even John Higgins had been singularly silent of late. Chris Heidt, the managing editor of his newspaper connection, had recently written: “We miss that fine patriotic ring that we have come to expect from our correspondent. Your stuff shows subtleties and innuendoes and the dissatisfaction of the boys--the little things back of the lines that make for disorganization, rather than the big doings at the front.” It was dawning on Dicky that there were two kinds of American patriots, soldier and civilian; and that for keenness and fire-eating zest, the man in the zone of advance was not to be compared to the paper-fed folk at home. In fact, there were only two ways for a writer to please the firesides of America, as the hot flames of Hun-hatred and world-correcting benefactions went up the chimney. One was to stay at home and write the war as you supposed it to be, and the other was to remember how you felt, how the war seemed to you, before you reached France, and write it from that angle.