“If I had I'd have been as sorry as you are, probably, that I'd knocked over the apple cart occasionally. But I wouldn't spend the rest of my life worrying about it and thinking I wasn't fit to go into decent society because of what happened to most of the A.E.F. Why you sound as if you'd committed the unpardonable sin. And it's nonsense.” “Well--thinking of Elinor--I'm not too darn sure I didn't,” from Ted, dejectedly. “That comes of being born in New England and that's all there is to it. Anyhow, it's over now, isn't it?” “Not exactly--it comes back.” “Well, kick it every time it does.” “But you don't understand. That and--people like Elinor--” says Ted hopelessly. “I do understand.” “You don't.” And this time Ted's face has the look of a burned man. “Well--” says Oliver, frankly puzzled. “Well, that's it. Oh, it doesn't matter. But if there was another war--” “Oh, leave us poor people that are trying to write a couple of years before you dump us into heroes' graves by the Yang tse Kiang!” “Another war--and bang! into the aviation.” Ted muses, his face gone thin with tensity. “It could last as long as it liked for me, providing I got through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and somebody, and somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things broke.” He sighs, and his face smooths back a little. “Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose,” he ends. “There are dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over the shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money as we wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and settle down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times and maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if another scrap doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as easy to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what wild young people--what naughty little wasters! They won't settle down and play Puss-in-the-corner at all--and, oh dear, oh dear, how they drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'” “I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us, though,” says Oliver, didactically. “We _are_ young, you know.” “Melgrove!” the conductor howls, sleepily. “Melgrove! Melgrove!” V The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a garage had been one of the “all modern conveniences” so fervidly painted in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass and a stubbly hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the “development,” and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue streak of the Sound.