The general staff takes no
unnecessary risks. Tell me, my George, when did you shave last? When did
you wash your pretty face last? When did you take your swank clothes off
last?"

"I think when I was a very little boy," George sighed.

Wandel became abruptly serious, turned so, perhaps, by a large shell
fragment, still warm, which he had picked up. As he fingered it he
stared at George.

"I know," George said, "that I point a moral, but even little boys would
be glad to be made clean if they got like this. Don't rub it in."

"To the contrary," Wandel said, thoughtfully, "I'm going back over a lot
of years. I'm remembering how that most extraordinary man, Freshman
George Morton, looked. I'm thinking that I've always been right about
you."

The warm sun, the diminution of racket, this sudden companionship, had
drawn George a little from his indifferent, half-dazed condition. He,
too, could look back, and without discomfort. On the Vesle it was only
death that counted. Birth didn't amount to a hill of beans, or money, or
education, except in that it made a man an officer. So George answered
frankly:

"All along you've guessed a lot about me, Driggs."

"Known, George."

"Would you mind telling me how?"

"It would be a pleasure to point out to you," Wandel drawled, "that a
lot of people aren't half as big fools as you've credited them with
being. You looked a little what you were at first. You've probably
forgotten that when you matriculated you put down a place of residence,
a record easily available for one who saw, as I did, means of using you.
Even a fool could have guessed something was up the night Betty was good
enough to make herself a part of the _beau monde_. I gathered a lot from
Lambert then."

"Yet," George said, almost indifferently, "you went on being a friend."

"Your political manager, George," Wandel corrected. "I'm not sure it
would have gone much further if it hadn't been for Dicky."

George was thoroughly aroused at last.

"Did Dicky know?"

"Not mere facts," Wandel answered. "What difference did they make? But
he could see what you had started from, how great the climb you were
taking. That's why he liked and admired you, because of what you were,
not because of what you wanted people to think you were. That's really
what first attracted me to you, and it amused me to see you fancying you
were getting away with so much more than you really were."

"Extraordinary!" George managed. "T