“Up in the camp, trying to get a little rest and exercise. But it's too lonesome nights. I rest better when I keep on the jump.” “You're in black; that doesn't mean--?” She shook her head. A light of eagerness in his eyes was quenched, and he growled: “Too bad!” He could afford to say it, since the object of his obloquy was alive. If the person mentioned had not been alive, the phrase he used would have been the same more gently intoned. Charity protested: “Shame on you! I know you mean it for flattery, but you mustn't, you really mustn't. I'm in black for--for Europe.” She laughed pitifully at the conceit. He answered, with admiring awe: “I've heard about you. You're a wonder; that's what you are, Charity Coe, a wonder. Here's a big hulk like me loafing around trying to kill time, and a little tike like you over there in France spending a fortune of money and more strength than even you've got in a slaughter-house of a war hospital. How did you stand it?” “It wasn't much fun,” she sighed, “but the nurses can't feel sorry for themselves when they see--what they see.” “I can imagine,” he said. But he could not have imagined her as she daily had been. She and the other princesses of blood royal or bourgeois had been moiling among the red human debris of war, the living garbage of battle, as the wagons and trains emptied it into the receiving stations. She and they had stood till they slept standing. They had done harder, filthier jobs than the women who worked in machine-shops and in furrows, while the male-kind fought. She had gone about bedabbled in blood, her hair drenched with it. Her delicate hands had performed tasks that would have been obscene if they had not been sublime in a realm of suffering where nothing was obscene except the cause of it all. She sickened at it more in retrospect than in action, and tried to shake it from her mind by a change of subject. “And what have you been up to, Jim?” “Ah, nothing but the same old useless loafing. Been up in the North Woods for some hunting and fishing,” he snarled. His voice always grew contemptuous when he spoke of himself, but idolatrous when he spoke of her--as now when he asked: “I heard you had gone back abroad. But you're not going, are you?” “Yes, as soon as I get my nerves a little steadier.” “I won't let you go back!” He checked himself. He had no right to dictate to her. He amended to: “You mustn't. It's dangerous crossing, with all those submarines and floating mines. You've done your bit and more.” “But there's so horribly much to do.” “You've done enough. How many children have you got now?” “About a hundred.” “Holy mother!” he whispered, with a profane piety. “Can even you afford as big a family as that?” “Well, I've had to call for some help.” “Let me chip in? Will you?” “Sure I will. Go as far as you like.” “All right; it's a bet. Name the sum, and I'll mail it to you.” “You'd better not mail me anything, Jim” she said.