"Not more than three or four hours at a sitting," I replied.

"And you have never spoken to anyone else as you have to Edith?"

"I have."

"Oh," she said.

"I wish it had been otherwise," I pleaded; "but life is very complex
nowadays on both sides of the Atlantic. Much that I have told Edith I
have also revealed to the passport clerk at Washington and the keeper
of birth records in New York. Something too I confided to the
assistant-book-keeper in the War Zone Bureau at the Custom-House in New
York, to the cashier of the French consulate at home, and to the gateman
of Cunard Pier 54, at the foot of West Fourteenth Street. I am sorry; I
wish Edith had been the first to whom I gave up the inner secrets of my
soul, but the fact is that to some extent she was anticipated by your
Military Control-Officer at Liverpool."

"It might have been worse," she sighed. "You have nice manners and a
good face. At home I suppose you are quite popular?"

"Up to the twenty-fifth of October I shouldn't have said so," I replied.
"But since then a great many people have taken to me. Not quite like
DORIS KEANE, you know, but still I have distributed in a little more
than a month no fewer than three dozen photographs of myself two and
a-half inches square. Your consul at New York took two, the French
Chamber of Commerce took three, and I am having some more ready for the
time when I go to make application for my emergency ration card, in case
your food department proves equally susceptible. I have been asked out