Everything I have been saying and describing is external, I know, but you see I was still grasping at externals, though underneath certain things were beginning to worry me. But I couldn't bring myself to voice anything I was wondering to these splendid strangers; later, though I never was with any one convoy more than a night, still I got the feeling that seeing so many of them had made me more familiar with the ones I happened to be with at the time, and so I screwed myself up to the point and was richly rewarded. But that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story. We drove away in the windy evening, past the parked rows of great glossy ambulances, and I bore with me chiefly an impression of gaiety, of a set purpose, of a certain schoolgirlish humour and that knack of making the best of everything which community life engenders when it does not do exactly the reverse; of long wooden huts that might have been bare but were decked with pictures, patterned chintzes, bookshelves, cushions; and above all, I took an impression of a certain quality that I can only describe as "stark" in the girls, though that is too bleak a word for what I mean. It is a sort of splendid austerity, that pervades their look and their outlook, that spiritually works itself out in this determined sticking at the job, this avoidance of any emotion that interferes with it, and in their bodies expresses itself in a disregard for appearances that one would never have thought to find in human woman. It leaves you gasping. They come in, windblown, reddened, hot with exertion, after recklessly abandoning their hands to all the harsh treatment of a car--the sacrifice of the hands is no small one, and every girl driving a car makes it--they come in, toss their caps down, brush their hair back from their brow in the one gesture that no woman has ever permitted to herself or liked in a lover--and they don't mind. It is amazing, that disregard for appearances, but of course it is partly explained by the fact that the natural tendency in young things would be to accentuate anything of that kind once it was discovered ... and for the rest--I really think they are too intent on what they are doing and care too little about themselves or what anyone may be thinking of them. What a blessed freedom!... This at last is what it is to be as free as a man. CHAPTER V OUTPOSTS