“What do you say we go A.W.O.L. to Paris?” “Dangerous.” “Well, what can they do? We are not enlisted men; they can only send us home. That's just what I want.” “I'll tell you what; we'll go to the Cochon Bleu and have a cocktail and think about it.” “The lion and the lizard keep their courts where... what the devil was his name? Anyway, we'll glory and drink deep, while Major Peabody keeps his court in Dijon to his heart's content.” Spurs jingled as the three officers went out. A fierce disgust took possession of John Andrews. He was ashamed of his spiteful irritation. If, when he had been playing the piano to a roomful of friends in New York, a man dressed as a laborer had shambled in, wouldn't he have felt a moment of involuntary scorn? It was inevitable that the fortunate should hate the unfortunate because they feared them. But he was so tired of all those thoughts. Drinking down the last of his tea at a gulp, he went into the shop to ask the old woman, with little black whiskers over her bloodless lips, who sat behind the white desk at the end of the counter, if she minded his playing the piano. In the deserted tea room, among the dismal upturned chairs, his crassened fingers moved stiffly over the keys. He forgot everything else. Locked doors in his mind were swinging wide, revealing forgotten sumptuous halls of his imagination. The Queen of Sheba, grotesque as a satyr, white and flaming with worlds of desire, as the great implacable Aphrodite, stood with her hand on his shoulder sending shivers of warm sweetness rippling through his body, while her voice intoned in his ears all the inexhaustible voluptuousness of life. An asthmatic clock struck somewhere in the obscurity of the room. “Seven!” John Andrews paid, said good-bye to the old woman with the mustache, and hurried out into the street. “Like Cinderella at the ball,” he thought. As he went towards the hospital, down faintly lighted streets, his steps got slower and slower. “Why go back?” a voice kept saying inside him. “Anything is better than that.” Better throw himself in the river, even, than go back. He could see the olive-drab clothes in a heap among the dry bullrushes on the river bank.... He thought of himself crashing naked through the film of ice into water black as Chinese lacquer. And when he climbed out numb and panting on the other side, wouldn't he be able to take up life again as if he had just been born? How strong he would be if he could begin life a second time! How madly, how joyously he would live now that there was no more war.... He had reached the door of the hospital. Furious shudders of disgust went through him. He was standing dumbly humble while a sergeant bawled him out for being late.