He threw up his head eagerly. "That's it ... somebody quite intelligent ... but without ambition ... who would"--the voice began to tail off queerly--"have the courage ... not to mind ... the ferocious egotism ... of the ... baffled." Suddenly he covered his face with his hands. "It wouldn't take me very long to learn the rudiments, I think," said Sally. "I'm rather quick at picking up the things that interest me. It would be enormously interesting to see what could be done with this--this----" "But you are off to France to-morrow." "The war won't last forever." The tone of her voice startled him. His heart leapt queerly. There was a time, not so long ago, when he would have given his soul to have surprised just that note in it. He began to shake violently. With all the will his calamity had left him he strove to hold himself in. Her voice was music, her nearness magical; what she offered him now was beyond his wildest hopes. Once he had jumped at her too soon, in a moment of delirium; but he had always known, by force of the strong temperament, that was such a torment to him now, that she was the only woman in the world he would ever really care for. "I see just the kind of helper you need." Divinely practical, yet divinely modern! "I could mug up my drawing in a week or two and I should never know enough to want to interfere with anything that mattered." He held himself tensely like one who sees a precipice yawning under his feet. "America coming in, do you think?" It was a heroic change of voice. "I wish she would. I'm afraid it may be a draw without her." Sally, with all her ribbons and her uniform, could rise to no immediate interest in America. "Our poor lads have had an awful grueling on the Somme. Seven hundred thousand casualties and nothing to show for it so far." "I know." The sightless eyes were lacerating her. "They ought to help us. It's their war as much as it's ours." "We can't blame them for staying out. Can't blame anybody for staying out. But we'll never get the right peace unless they help us." "Some people think they'd not make much difference." "My God!" It was the vehemence she used not to like. "They'd simply tip the scale. Have you ever been there?" "No." "I have. Some country, America. They've pinched our best Torrington, curse them ... not that that took me there. One afternoon, though, I happened to be looking for it in a moldy, one-horse museum just off Washington Square--I forget the name of it--when I walked straight into the arms of dear old Jim Stanning who had actually come all the way from Europe on purpose to gaze at it." Sally emitted becoming surprise. "If you read that in a novel you'd say it was the sort of thing that doesn't happen. But it did happen. Fancy old Jim coming all those miles by flood and field to look at a strip of canvas not as big as that drawing board. 'The Valley of the Sharrow on an afternoon in July.' By the way, did you ever happen to meet him?"