icity of them, for one
thing. You got pretty close to them at night sometimes, especially when
the homesick ones had gone to bed, and the phonograph was playing in a
corner of the long, dim room. There were some shame-faced tears hidden
under army blankets those nights, and Willy Cameron did some blinking on
his own account.

Then, under all the blasphemy, the talk about women, the surface
sordidness of their daily lives and thoughts, there was one instinct
common to all, one love, one hidden purity. And the keyword to those
depths was "home."

"Home," he said one day to Lily Cardew. "Mostly it's the home they've
left, and maybe they didn't think so much of it then. But they do now.
And if it isn't that, it's the home they want to have some day." He
looked at Lily. Sometimes she smiled at things he said, and if she had
not been grave he would not have gone on. "You know," he continued,
"there's mostly a girl some place. All this talk about the nation,
now--" He settled himself on the edge of the pine table where old
Anthony Cardew's granddaughter had been figuring up her week's accounts,
and lighted his pipe, "the nation's too big for us to understand. But
what is the nation, but a bunch of homes?"

"Willy dear," said Lily Cardew, "did you take any money out of the cigar
box for anything this week?"

"Dollar sixty-five for lard," replied Willy dear. "As I was saying,
we've got to think of this country in terms of homes. Not palaces like
yours--"

"Good gracious!" said Lily, "I don't live in a palace. Get my
pocket-book, will you? I'm out three dollars somehow, and I'd rather
make it up myself than add these figures over again. Go on and talk,
Willy. I love hearing you."

"Not palaces like yours," repeated Mr. Cameron, "and not hovels. But
mostly self-respecting houses, the homes of the plain people. The middle
class, Miss Cardew. My class. The people who never say anything, but
are squeezed between capital, represented by your grandfather, with its
parasites, represented by you, and--"

"You represent the people who never say anything," observed the slightly
flushed parasite of capital, "about as adequately as I represent the
idle rich."

Yet not even old Anthony could have resented the actual relationship
between them. Lily Cardew, working alone in her hut among hundreds of
men, was as without sex consciousness as a child. Even then her flaming
interest was in the private soldiers. The officers were able to