urprise. He hesitated. A reserve officer,
sitting by to help, asked:

"Weren't you captain of the Princeton football team a few years ago?"

"Yes, but we were beaten."

"You must learn to say, 'sir,' Mr. Morton, when you address an officer."

George flushed. That was etching his past rather too sharply. Then he
smiled, and amused at the silly business, mimicked Simpson's servility.

"Very well, sir. I'll remember, sir."

The West Point man was pleased, he was even more impressed, because he
knew football. He made marks on the card. When George essayed a salute
and stepped aside for the next candidate he knew he wasn't submerged in
this mass of splendid individualities which were veiled by the
similarity of their uniforms.

Lambert, Goodhue, and he were scattered among different companies. That
was as well, he reflected, since his partners already wore officers' hat
cords. The spare moments they had, nevertheless, they spent together,
mulling over Blodgett's frequent reports which they never found time
thoroughly to digest. Even George didn't worry about that, for his
confidence in Blodgett was complete at last.

He hadn't time to worry about much, for that matter, beyond the demands
of each day, for Plattsburgh was like Princeton only in that it aroused
all his will power to find the right path and to stick to it. At times
he wished for the nearly smooth brain with which he had entered college.
He had acquired too many wrinkles of logic, of organization, of
efficiency, of common-sense, to survive these months without frequent
mad desires to talk out in meeting, without too much humorous
appreciation of some of the arbiters of his destiny. Regular army
officers gave him the impression of having been forced through a long,
perpetually contracting corridor until they had come out at the end as
narrow as one of the sheets of paper work they loved so well. But he got
along with them. That was his business. He was pointed out enviously as
one of the football captains. It was a football captains' camp. All such
giants were slated for company or battery commander's commissions at
least.

If he got it, George wondered if he would hate a captain's uniform as
much as the private's one he wore.

With the warm weather the week-ends offered sometimes a relief. Men's
wives or mothers had taken little houses in the town or among the hills,
and the big hotel on the bluff opened its doors and welcomed other wives
and mothers,