In the evening they were perilously polite again. Martin Dockerill appeared and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the British Aero Corps, to get life's supreme sensation--scouting ten thousand feet in air, while dozens of batteries fired at him; a nose-to-earth volplane. The thinking Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer--and as one who was not merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured. And Martin Dockerill seemed so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might go. Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter-of-fact chatter about a kind of wandering which shut her out as completely as did the project of war. "I don't know," said he, "but what the biggest fun in chasing round the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a hand-out and sneak on a blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every brakie and constabule out after you. That's living!" When Martin was gone Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended to be absorbed in a magazine. He took from the mess of papers and letters that lived in his inside coat pocket a war-map he had clipped from a newspaper, and drew tactical lines on it. From his room he brought a small book he had bought that day. He studied it intently. Ruth managed to see that the title of the book was _Aeroplanes and Air-Scouting in the European Armies_. She sprang up, cried: "Hawk! Why are you reading that?" "Why shouldn't I read it?" "You don't mean to---- You----" "Oh no, I don't suppose I'd have the nerve to go and enlist now. You've already pointed out to me that I've been getting cold feet." "But why do you shut me out? Why do you?" "Oh, good Lord! have we got to go all over that again? We've gone over it and over it and over it till I'm sick of telling you it isn't true." "I'm very sorry, Hawk. Thank you for making it clear to me that I'm a typical silly wife." "And thank you for showing me I'm a clumsy brute. You've done it quite often now. Of course it doesn't mean anything that I've given up aviation." "Oh, don't be melodramatic. Or if you must be, don't fail to tell me that I've ruined your life." "Very well. I won't say anything, then, Ruth." "Don't look at me like that, Hawk. So hard. Studying me.... Can't you understand---- Haven't you any perception? Can't you understand how hard it is for me to come to you like this, after last night, and try----" "Very nice of you," he said, grimly. With one cry of "Oh!" she ran into her bedroom.