"Of course'! Look at her!" His voice was ironic, though tender. "You sit here, giving me caviar and Burgundy -and candle-light, and gracious intonations and peace and firelight. It's as if you offered me a Roman bath, complete, from tepidarium to solium, with thirty skilful slaves to pamper me. It's an anachronism; it's irrelevant; it's unreal; it's you might say-Martian. I don't mind the escape from life, if you can pull it off; but you can't. Why do you suppose I can't eat your cates and drink your wine? Why, my dear, the mode has changed. My palate calls for the food of my generation. You give me marchpane, as it were. Do you honestly expect any one in the twentieth century to eat marchpane?"

"My dear Oswald, do you imagine I live this way, myself? If I tried to make a little feast for you-" She broke down in her attempt to justify herself. If Oswald did not understand her, he had indeed changed.

"I am not reproaching you, Millicent." The words fell with great softness and suavity.

"Oh, I thought The point is that this-what you call marchpane, what you and I, equally, were bred on

-comes

into my morality. You know how little I approve of""leash-eating," she was going to say, but caught herself back; there was not time to teach him new slang "of excess, at any time. But I care for beauty and decency and leisure and the pleasures of the mind; and it has always seemed to me important that the pleasures of the flesh should show some sign of being ordered by the spirit. We were both, in the times that were, ascetic hedonists. We hated gross things and we believed in taking pleasures delicately. We believed in good food and good wine and good clothes as we believed in good pictures and good

books. We hated roughness and coarseness, wherever and whoever. We weren't esthetes, God knows; but we cared for what the race had taken the trouble to achieve in the way of amenities. We weren't Puritans, either. And it still seems to me important that the ways of civilized living shouldn't pass from the earth even to a bit of a savory at the end of a dinner, or a glass of Burgundy meanwhile. Or a cigarette." She smiled and pushed the box over to him. “It's my way of keeping the home fires burning, Oswald. Even as Tommy on leave must find beer and tripes waiting. Ask Lady Sayres if I'm a sybarite by profession! But one isn't going to have to do war-relief work forever. There is the rest of life-for some of you."

may

She looked him very directly in the eyes. "Do you think I don't see how lots of people take it?" she went on. "That plenty of women think, because he be killed as soon as he goes back, he should have everything his appetite suggests before he goes? There's enough champagne drunk in London to float a hospital unit in. I loathe that-if only because it can't last any more than the tragedy that sustains it can last. It's immoral because it can't be a permanent basis for life. But my marchpane! You may kill me for it, my dear, but I place it with Magdalen Tower and Westminster Abbey and the things that we must come back to. Things that are waiting, because they are strong and good, because they've been proved. I give you a frugal little dinner-which may be our last; and I've worked myself to the bone to make it not too unlike many dinners I've given you beforejust because, if you pull out of it and I pull out, and the world pulls out, that is the kind of dinner best suited to us, because it's by such familiar details of life that we shall reconstruct the life we thought worth while when we had breath and chance to choose. And you call it marchpane and immoral! No, my dear Oswald"-she shook her head-"I don't see it that way. Every woman does what she can for her fighting men when they come home. I do this just the quiet old modest thing, the thing that has a right to last. For the rest-I live somewhat less well than my pensioner

yonder. I shouldn't feel decent to be living comfortably while my best friend on earth is in the trenches. But when my best friend comes back to me-no army chaplain in the world will tell me that I must give him bully beef for his dinner or not light a few fagots on my hearth." She flung out her arms, gently emphatic. "Is it my morality against yours, for the first time in our lives, Oswald?"

He had listened carefully to her exposition. "It's not a question of morality," he answered quietly, at last. "Oh, well, of taste." "Not taste in that sense. Not taste in the precious sense of form. Taste in the bodily sense, rather. You've meant to appeal to something that isn't there any longer to be appealed to.'

She looked at him quietly, making her eyes stony-to counteract, she hoped, the flush that she could not control. Was it merely to pick a quarrel with her that he had come? To tell her, without telling her, that there was another woman? Well, let him. Did it matter, if she lost him, whether it was by defection or by death? Her honest heart told her not. Better, indeed, to lose him to his happiness than to his destruction. Let him go -even to a leash-eater, if he must. Yet the feminine of classic proverbs had for an instant its way with her, and she gazed at the puckered cheek with inward cynicism, affecting to herself to find it a supreme disfigurement.

"May we go into the other room?" he asked.

She withdrew her heavy eyes from his face. "Surely." And she led the way. Once there, he abetted her apostasyif, that was what he thought it by placing, unrequested, another bit of wood on the little fire.

She quivered a little at the compliment, but his tone of voice, all gravity and tenderness, forbade her to mind its strangeness.

"A matter of taste." He repeated another phrase. "It's just, Millicent my dear, that I don't like marchpane any more. I don't know why I used that silly word, but we'll keep it for convenience. Our Elizabethan ancestors crowned all feasts with it. I only meant that for all practical purposes my palate has altered as much as if this familiar food you give me were in truth Elizabethan. I sit at your table not as myself, but as an ancestor. And my taste refuses to turn ancestral. I don't like the fare. There's nothing in me that craves it. I've been hurled three hundred years ahead into space and time. I don't know what it may have done to others; I don't think it has affected Tommy much. But I have had an unusual experience. I watch our fellows trying not to throw back-and it isn't easy in Flanders, where you look across No Man's Land at skin-clad beasts. They have thrown back so far and so successfully that we mostly dig our heels in to stay where we are and shame them. But my heels took wings unto them and went forward into a grim and nasty future. It would have been easierpleasanter to go back. . . . I seem to have been born again into a bleak new world. The trenches are real. They are too physical not to be. And that future is

very physical, too—but it isn't the old kind. You are trying, God bless you, to poetize food and drink—"

"Not just food and drink, Oswald," she protested.

"No, I suppose not. Put it that I've got a twist in my mind to match the twist in my face." Unconsciously he turned his cheek slightly to the light. "I'm not normal; I'm utterly different. I don't say there are many like me. I don't think there are. It's your-ourbeastly luck that I've taken this thing at a tangent of my own."

"Is it perhaps just a question of tension? That you don't dare let yourself down until it's over? That you have found a mood that resists it, and you must keep that mood at all costs?"

Her voice was very soothing and

sweet. The figment of the other woman had passed from her mind, and in travail she was recapturing, for his sake, her old lucidity.

"You're a dear, Millicent. You always were. I think you could understand anything in the world but this.' "I haven't met it before, you see.' In spite of her, a note of professional cheerfulness a hospital tone crept into her voice. She had met shell shock often, in such intervals as she knewhours when, to rest yourself from hard work, you took on some harder work. "Most men are glad enough to see Blighty. And when they aren't wounded they seem to rollick. They seize the day. . . . I've wondered if that wasn't what pulled them through. It's a pity you feel the future. Most of them don't think of the future. They've apparently learned not to.'

وو

"I don't think of it in that sense," he apologized. "It simply is all around me. I can't go back to what pleased me before. I'm different to what I was." He stated it simply, painfully. "If I call it the future, it's because I seem to see that the future is going to be more like my vision of the world than like yours or theirs.'

He lighted another cigarette. "Just take the fact," he said, presently, "that I don't crave, or even like, the familiar food and the familiar mise en scène.”

"But do you like bully beef and apple jam and a world all-crawly?" she asked, defiantly.

"No, but it seems natural. It's got to be like that, for all civilized men, for a long time. Until the war is over.'

"Yes. Granted. And then? For that is my only point."

"I've lost touch with the old habits. And I don't particularly want to go back to them. This isn't a disagreeable interlude, like a stretch of poverty in a man's life, you see. It's the whole blooming show, forever and ever."

"Yet the war must end."

"It must." He ground his teeth. "It must. But when we come back there'll be thousands of us broke to a

made me and, it must be, a lot of others -materialists."

In spite of her trouble, she laughed. "I can't say it seems to have hit you that way, Oswald."

He smiled grudgingly. "No. Not in the old sense. In a new one. I've lost the power to dream, to think. I grapple with nasty facts. I care immensely to get my food, but I only want the food I need. I only want some kind of bed to sleep in, and I don't want to sleep too soft. I want to do my day's work and do it with my whole body. I can't stand non-essentials or intellectual debauches. I don't want ever to read a book or see a picture. I don't want to be amused."

"In that you are special. Not a bit like the proletariat. Cinemas and beer have not lost their hold on Whitechapel."

"No. I said I was different. . . . Our beastly luck!" he murmured once more. "I want machinery, more and more of it, and days parceled out intelligently. Machines to do more than they ever have done before, with fewer hours of labor, but every one laboring."

"Oh," she breathed. "Why, cheer up, my dear! It's just Socialism. Lots of people have that. Even Lady Sayres has it. That's why she's so hard on us.

39

He went on, paying no attention to the interruption."I don't care how they manage it. I simply want life to be made physically possible for every one. That means it won't be physically luxurious for any one. I don't want highfalutin' talk... and I'm not especially interested at present in the inevitable politics of it. I don't even mind people's being privileged, so long as they don't waste their time on non-essentials. And I come back to the fact that everything that isn't necessary to health and long life is unnecessary to anything. Eliminate the danger and the sickness and the vermin, and you'd have a possible world right there in the trenches. But Magdalen Tower and Westminster Abbeythey've nothing whatever to do with life. "You don't resent Rheims?"

"I resent it"-he spoke very slowly

back to the old. You won't be able to do anything with us. And what we shall do with you, God knows. The war is making a lot of men mystics; it's

They smashed it because they thought the French cared. That was beastly.'

'And you think that, in a world which rules out beauty and graciousness and

pleasure, you'll manage to have a tolerable ethic?"

"We went to war for ethics. We've been perpetrating indecencies for two years in the interests of decency. It's the last great paradox. But if I thought we were fighting for Magdalen Tower-I'd quit. The only right we have to fight at all-bar the old right of self-defense-is the right of knowing that, on the whole, we're more willing than they are to give everybody a chance at the essentials."

"And you think that the machinists of the future since, apparently, we're all to run machines will be gentlemen? You think that this terre à terre materialism of yours will make for kindness, for not hurting other people's feelings, for not looting and wantonly murdering and breaking cathedrals stone by stone?"

"I think that the men who come out of the hell of Flanders and France will jolly well see to it that there shall be no needless suffering. We're fed up with suffering.

And you think you can prevent people from wanting beauty and laughter and dreams-the life of the spirit?"

"I think they will believe, having lived the life of the body for so long, that the body comes first. I think they will see to it that all bodies are made, and kept, adequate. A pretty big order in itself. . . . And I think, for a long time, they will feel that absence of bodily suffering is 'paradise enow.' To insure that, they'll pass minimum-kindness laws, if need be." He smiled his twisted smile. "But they're not going to traffic with beauty and such-like."

"It sounds very German," she ventured, drily. Her own problem she had pushed back into the farthest recesses of her mind. There could be no personal problem with a man like this. Yet she must get to the bottom of it. He was still dear to her, whether madman, or invalid, or merely a soul estranged from her.

"No; because Germany has the old ideas. They don't really want people to be comfortable. They want wealth and pomp and luxury; in their uneducated way, they still want what they call beauty. They don't see.

They

might be Romans or Medicis. Kindness takes beauty from the world; they'll never stoop to kindness. What you call

beauty means the toil of slaves. It's only by overworking thousands, and underfeeding more than thousands, that enough labor can be spent uselessly on the tyrants' pleasure-garden. I'm not a Socialist, because Socialists think they can eat their cake and have it, too. I know what you call beauty must pass. Lots of people know it in their heartsbut they regret it. I don't. I'm already broke. The non-essentials disgust me.'

"And you insist on making your own definition of essential. It hasn't struck you that the human race has never thought mere bodily health in itself enough? What about the chromo-lithographs in the slums, and the draggled feathers in battered hats?"

"They've aped others. Beauty has had a prestige value. When the prestige value has gone-you'll see how quick they'll drop esthetics."

"What about love?" She asked it very coldly. "Love has always brought what you call non-essentials in its train."

"I don't know about love. There'll be healthy creatures meeting each other and mating, no doubt. But all the tiresome fal-lals will have to go. All the decorations and the vanity-the rings and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel and the mantles and the wimples and the crisping-pins.'

“And you think"-she mocked him softly, with a return of the old tenderness-"that you will change the human heart so easily?"

"Easily!" he groaned; and he got up and walked to the tightly shuttered window, where he stood with his back to her. "Easily!" he muttered from that distance. And silence fell between them while her imagination and his memory conjured up that world of bitter mud, that nether slime to which men had voluntarily returned in indefinable and untranslatable pain.

"I mean, she murmured, after a moment, "in so short a time, can the heart of man and woman change?"

"Is it so short a time? It seems to me long enough to beget a new type. Millions of years have been compressed. . . There must be other men like me,' came his cry of pain. "Men to whom beauty, even a woman's beauty, means nothing any more; men who don't want

any of the things they wanted before; men who know that if needless pain is to pass from the world, there can be no needless pleasure left in it. . . . Men who don't give a damn for anything except immunity from pain. . . . Materialists not nice ones-men like me," he repeated. All Millicent Hay's house of life lay tumbled about her feet, destroyed by night in London even as houses of wood and stone were destroyed by Zeppelins. Because that devastation was so vast, she felt the courage not to flee; courage to search among the refuse like a scavenger for any fragment that might be left.

"Just how" her voice, grown small, pierced the dusk in which he stood uncertain-"just how do you feel about me, Oswald ?"

He turned and came slowly back to her, picking his way, stepping carefully, as though he, too, were conscious of surrounding ruins. Then he bowed himself at her feet, taking her hands in his, hiding his eyes upon them. She looked down quietly at his ruined cheek.

"You're the only thing that keeps me there," he whispered. "I pretend I'm defending you from pain. You and others like you if there are any others like you.'

وو

Her ardor, pressed back upon her heart, set that to beating hard; but she stayed silent.

For I'm tired of killing people to prevent killing in the future. I hate all paradox; it belongs to the old world I can't stomach. All the big historic gestures have been urged by paradox. Paradox must stop, as much as war. His tired muffled voice came so low that she had to bend her head very close to his to hear. "I'm sorry that I don't care as I did. I loved you very much. But now-you're good and sweet. . . and yet caring has gone. I'm just incapable. And yet I longed to marry you, Millicent, as men do long. You were the best the old order had to offer. You've been an angel to me to-night. But I've no more feeling than a rock." His voice died away in a sigh.

Millicent Hay was to know the whole gamut of emotion in one fraught evening of her life. For an instant she felt he had spoken truth in saying that millions of years were nowadays compressed. Life, at all events, was proceeding head

long for her. She passed through, in measured moments, the throes of revulsions that might have taken months. Two hours before she had known that she loved him ardently; now she knew that he left her cold; and she seemed to have been growing cold for years.

While he remained silent-worn out, perhaps in his strained position, she looked down at the puckered cheek so close to her. It was hideous. Two hours ago it had not mattered. Now she knew that she could never marry a man with a face like that. The flesh had not known itself in the first moment of encounter. So, ten years after marriage, her nerves might have begun to revolt against the marred visage. And because she was now as cold as he declared himself to be, she saw that his case was sadder than hers. She braced herself to do the utmost to let him prove his case the worse. She bent her head down again until her hair brushed his; her gentle hands were on his shoulders; his mouth was hidden in the folds of her dress; but she pressed her lips hard down upon the hideous cheek and kissed it-kissed it close and long, as though a snake had bitten him and she were drawing the poison out into herself.

He started. Had she hurt him? She did not know. But he rose with a clean straight spring and presently shook his head. Her gorge had risen at the touch of that inhuman flesh; but, her lips released from it, she was firm. She smiled at him, so infinitely relieved at his headshake that there was no shame in her eyes. She had clung to him like a lover, for the first time in her life, and she felt as if she had been doing some unprintable, necessary hospital task. It was over; it had done no good; she should never have to do it again. This man was nothing to her; thank God she was nothing to him. But pity was uppermost. War had crushed the Oswald Hamlin she knew. Here was only a straight and martial creature, prime food for cannon -no coward, a good officer, but a man from whom war, with a skill beyond surgery, had removed his familiar soul.

He was evidently leaving, and she rose. Vaguely, as they stood there, she longed for an air raid. There were no tests left that she could apply unaided.