fice, and go among the despondent soldiers as a Sister
of Gaiety. Perhaps Bill the Blackfaceman would be going over--if he
had not stayed in Germany too long and been interned there. To return
to the team with him, being the final degradation, would be the final
atonement. She felt that she was called, called back. There could be
nothing else she would hate more to do; therefore she would love to do
that most of all.

She would lunch with Davidge to-morrow, tell him her plan, bid him
farewell, go to Baltimore, learn Nicky's secret, thwart it one way or
another--and then set about her destiny.

She abhorred the relapse so utterly that she wept. The warm tears
refreshed her eyes before they froze on her cheeks, and she fell
asleep in the blissful assurance of a martyrdom.

CHAPTER IV

The next morning Mamise woke in her self-warmed bed, at the nudge of a
colored maid bundled up like an Eskimo, who carried a breakfast-tray
in mittened hands.

Mamise said: "Oh, good morning, Martha. I'll bathe before breakfast if
you'll turn on the hot water, please."

"Hot water? Humph! Pipes done froze last night, an' bus' loose this
mo'nin', and fill the kitchen range with water an' bus' loose again.
No plumber here yit. Made this breakfuss on the gas-stove. That's
half-froze, tew. I tell you, ma'am, you're lucky to git your coffee
nohow. Better take it before it freezes, tew."

Mamise sighed and glanced at the clock. The reproachful hands stood at
eleven-thirty.

"Did the clock freeze, too? That can't be the right time!"

"Yessum, that's the raht tahm."

"Great heavens!"

"Yes, ma'am."

Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and breakfasted
with speed. She dressed with all the agility she could muster.

She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all. In modern
history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the least for the
heroine--even such a dubious heroine as Mamise--to have a bathless
day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles they get at least two
baths a day: one heroic cold shower in the morning and one hot tub in
the late afternoon before getting into the faultless evening attire.
This does not apply to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for
they never bathe. ("Why should they," my wife puts in, "since they're
going to commit suicide, anyway?")

But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity, that the
very politest people came to know the old-fashioned luxur