blurring the copying-book
and under-stamping the letters. When sent to the bank, a few yards
distant, he was absent for an hour. Cigarettes and late hours may have
given him a touch of pastiness.

To-day, what a change! Tall, well-set-up and bronzed, he is a model of
health and strength. His eyes meet all our eyes frankly; he has done
nothing to be ashamed of: there is no unposted letter in his pocket,
no consciousness of a muddled telephone message in his head. To be on
the dreaded carpet of the manager's room was once an ordeal; to-day he
can drop cigarette-ash on it and turn never a hair.

"Oh yes," he says, "he has been under fire. Knows it backwards. Knows
the difference in sound between all the shells. So far he's been very
lucky, but, Heavens! the pals he's lost! Terrible things happen, but
one gets numbed--apathetic, you know.

"What does it feel like to go over the top? The first time it's a
rotten feeling, but you get used to that too. War teaches you what you
can get used to, by George it does! He wouldn't have believed it, but
there--"

And so on. All coming quite naturally and simply; no swank, no false
modesty.

"This is his first leave since he went to France, and he thought he
must come to see the firm first of all. Sad about poor old Parkins,
wasn't it? Killed directly. And Smithers' leg--that was bad too. Rum
to see such a lot of girls all over the place, doing the boys' jobs.
Well, well, it's a strange world, and who would have thought all this
was going to happen?..."

Such is his conversation on the carpet. In the great clerks' room,
where there are now so many girls, he is a shade more of a dog. The
brave, you know, can't be wholly unconscious of the fair, and as I
pass through I catch the same words, but spoken with a slightly more
heroic ring.

"Lord, yes, you get used even to going over the top. A rotten feeling
the first time, but you get used to it. That's one of the rum things
about war, it teaches you what you can get used to. You get apathetic,
you know. That's the word--apathetic: used to anything. Standing for
hours in water up to your knees. Sleeping among rats." (Here some
pretty feminine squeals.) "It is a fact," he swears to them. "Rats
running over you half the night, and now and then a shell bursting
close by."

Standing at his own old desk as he talks, he looks even taller and
stronger than before--by way of contrast, I suppose, and as I pass
out I wonder if he will eve