t for a week now he had failed to take home any shaving-soap
and had had to use ordinary hand-soap. "Golly! I must go in and get a
shaving-stick. No, darn it! I haven't got enough money with me. I
_must_ try to remember to get some to-morrow." He rebuked himself for
thinking of soap when love lay dying. "But I must remember to get that
soap, just the same!" So grotesque is man, the slave and angel, for
while he was sick with the desire to go back to the one comrade, he
sharply wondered if he was not merely acting all this agony. He went
into the store. But he did not telephone to Ruth. There was no
sufficiently convincing reason for calling her up. He bought a silly
ice-cream soda, and talked to the man behind the counter as he drank
it. All the while a tragic Ruth stood before him, blaming him for he
knew not what.

He reluctantly went on, regretting every step that took him from her.
But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into
defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his
top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of
"niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go
anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and
comfortable. He didn't have to take dancing lessons or fear the
results of losing his job, or of being robbed of his interests in the
Touricar. He glanced interestedly at a pretty girl; recklessly went
into a cigar-store and bought a fifteen-cent cigar. He was free again.

As he marched on, however, his defiance began to ooze away. He went
over every word Ruth or he had said, and when he reached his room he
sat deep in an arm-chair, like a hurt animal crouching, his coat still
on, his felt hat over his eyes, his tie a trifle disarranged, his legs
straight out before him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he
disconsolately contemplated a photograph of Forrest Haviland in
full-dress uniform that stood on the low bureau among tangled ties,
stray cigarettes, a bronze aviation medal, cuff-buttons, and a
haberdasher's round package of new collars. His gaze was steady and
gloomy. He was dramatizing himself as hero in a melodrama. He did not
know how the play would end.

But his dramatization of himself did not indicate that he was not in
earnest.

Forrest's portrait suggested to him, as it had before, that he had no
picture of Ruth, that he wanted one. Next time he saw her he would
ask her.... Then he re