woman loved him. You
understand, she was very often only a makeshift--a symbol for the woman
he would have married if death hadn't been in such a hurry. Well, for
some of us Death has had time to spare and we've come back--come back
starved, emotional, tyrannic--passionate to possess all the things for
which our hearts have hungered and of which they have been deprived so
long. It was easy to strip ourselves of everything when we thought we
were going to die. But now that we know we're going to live we're
tempted to recover some of our lost years by violence. You must be
patient with us, Terry; we're sick children, querulous, eager to take
offense and over-exacting. I was like that when I blackmailed you into
meeting me this morning. It was unworthy of me to have treated that
child's promise as binding."

"But I was seventeen; I wasn't a child. And I wanted to meet you--I did
truly."

"Letting me down lightly?" he smiled.

"No, an honest fact."

When he gazed at her with kindly incredulity, she edged herself closer
and bent forward in a generous effort to persuade him.

"Don't you see that what you've said of yourself was true of me as
well?"

"I wasn't talking in particular of myself," he parried; "I was including
all the other men."

"Yes, but especially of yourself. It was of yourself that you were
talking. What you've said of yourself is true of me and--oh, of almost
all women. We saw you men march away; you seemed lost to us forever.
Everything seemed at an end. So we did what you did--chose one man who
would embody all our dreams and become especially ours. We wrote to
him, shopped for him, placed his portrait on our dressing-tables, were
anxious for him and, oh, so proud of him. We didn't stop to ask whether
he was the man with whom we could live for always. There wasn't any
_always_. It didn't look as though there was ever again going to be any
_always_. And then the horror stopped and we found ourselves with a man
on our hands--a man who, though we had known him so well, would come
back to us different. We hadn't meant to cheat him when we made all
those promises; but now that he's really ours, we're not sure that
we---- All the ecstasies and tears that we wrote to him on paper----"
She made a helpless gesture with her hands. "They don't seem real. It's
not our fault. They belonged to the part of nurses and soldiers that we
were acting. And now we've slipped out by the stage-door and we've
become our