it's over now, isn't it?"

"Not exactly--it comes back."

"Well, kick it every time it does."

"But you don't understand. That and--people like Elinor--" says Ted
hopelessly.

"I do understand."

"You don't." And this time Ted's face has the look of a burned man.

"Well--" says Oliver, frankly puzzled. "Well, that's it. Oh, it doesn't
matter. But if there was another war--"

"Oh, leave us poor people that are trying to write a couple of years
before you dump us into heroes' graves by the Yang tse Kiang!"

"Another war--and bang! into the aviation." Ted muses, his face gone
thin with tensity. "It could last as long as it liked for me, providing
I got through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and
somebody, and somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things
broke."

He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.

"Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose," he ends. "There
are dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over
the shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money
as we wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then
they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and
settle down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times
and maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if
another scrap doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as easy
to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what
wild young people--what naughty little wasters! They won't settle down
and play Puss-in-the-corner at all--and, oh dear, oh dear, how they
drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'"

"I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us,
though," says Oliver, didactically. "We _are_ young, you know."

"Melgrove!" the conductor howls, sleepily. "Melgrove! Melgrove!"

V

The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was
twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a
garage had been one of the "all modern conveniences" so fervidly painted
in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was
the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass
and a stubbly hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by
the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner
of the "development," and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue
streak of