On the whole she was sorry that father had not stuck to his resolution. She was glad to have been born, but as for Horatio, it was clearly a mistake to summon him out of some evening star to be blown to pieces on this one. For consider what life on earth is. It is a mere stain on the rock, a mist that clings with hands, happy so long as it is stupid. Jean was freed from sentimentality by knowing so much about fish. They would lie still while she skinned them, and she concluded that really normal human beings are almost as free from nerves. She had read of a Zulu so insensitive to pain that when his back brain was cloven by a sword he was laid up for only two days. And what was the history of civilization on her star? Only those persons survived who could live on very little. The kings of Egypt were gone, but the slaves of Egypt still lived, eating corn and never needing a dentist. In China the slaves ate rice and outlasted all their conquerors. There it was in a nutshell. The earth belonged to people whose teeth would wear down to the root. The earth had always been inherited by the meek, and always would be. Clearly earth was not a proper place for a superior mind like Horatio’s. He ought never to have come. He might better be in the loftiest star of unascended heaven, pinnacled dim in the intense inane. So, on the whole, she would never summon any Horatios down. She would never get married. And when she got over missing her mother and brother, she would be the cheerfulest little old maid in the world. Chapter 16. Sulphur On that same first day of 1918, Lieutenant Mahan was commanding a machine gun company composed of men chosen by himself. Down in Carolina he had picked them for their sinews and their eyesight, not for their language, which sometimes reminded him of the sixteenth element. And a month later he sailed with the advance detachment of the third division. Once on French soil, he spent March in an American school and April in a quiet sector under French supervision. On the first day of May his new commission arrived, and he became Captain Mahan. It was clear by this time that he had the knack of command, but of all his men none was so devoted to him as his Indian orderly, O. Fisher. With equal coolness the young brave would polish his shoes or call him a blind Bwan. By Bwan he meant a Sioux, a contemptible weakling. His captain was a blind Bwan whenever he could not see as far as O. Fisher, which was often.