en for life--that he knew. And
he wanted to find her that he might tell her he understood, tell
her--what he had never told any one--that all his life he, too, had
dreamed of a something somewhere.

And he was growing the farther apart from his army friends because he
had come to think of them as standing between.

During the summer he had seen. In the mornings when they were going to
work, in the evenings when they were going home, he had many times been
upon the streets with the people who worked. He could not any longer
regard the enlargement of the army, its organization and problems as the
most vital thing in the world. It did not seem to him that what the world
wanted was a more deadly rifle. His lip curled a little as he looked down
at the men and women below and considered how little difference it made
to them whether rifles were improved or not. And so many things did make
difference with them--they needed improvements on so many things--that to
be giving one's life to perfecting instruments of destruction struck him
as a sorry vocation.

It made him feel very distinctly apart.

He knew of no class of men more isolated from the real war of the world
than were the men of the army. They were tied up in their own war of
competition--competition in preparedness for war. They were frantically
occupied in the creation of a Frankenstein. They would so perfect
destruction as to destroy themselves. Meanwhile their blood had grown so
hot in their war of competition that they were in prime condition for
persuading themselves a real war awaited them. This hot blood found its
way into much talk of hardihood and strenuousness, vigor, martial
virtues, "the steeps of life," "the romance of history"--all calculated
to raise the temperature of tax-paying blood. So successful was the
self-delusion of the militarist that sanity appeared mollycoddelism.

Their greatest fear was fear of the loss of fear.

And now they were threatened by colorless economists who were
mollycoddelistically making clear that the "stern reality" was the giant
hallucination.

It seemed rather close to farce.

That night he was going back. Katie, too, had gone. For the first time
that summer neither of them would be there. It seemed giving up.

Loneliness reached out into places vast and barren in the thought that
both in the things of the heart and the affairs of men he seemed destined
to remain apart.

He looked far more the dreamer than the