of nice sightly real estate about--it's a gently rolling country,
uneven and something like College Hill in Wichita, but there's
got to be a lot of money spent draining it; you can tell that at
a glance, if the fellow gets anywhere with his proposition!"

[Illustration with caption: "You'll have to put out that cigar,
sir."]

A time always comes in a voyage, when men and women begin to step
out as individuals from the mass. With us it was the Red Cross
stenographers and the American Ambulance boys who first ceased being
ladyships and lordships and took their proper places in the cosmos.
They were a gay lot--and young. And human nature is human nature.
So the decks began to clutter up with boys and girls intensely
interested in exploring each other's lives. It is after all the
most wonderful game in the world. And while the chaperon fluttered
about more or less, trying to shoo the girls off the dark decks at
night, and while public opinion on the boat made eminently proper
rules against young women in the smoking room, still young blood did
have its way, which really is a good way; better than we think,
perhaps, who look back in cold blood and old blood. And by the token
of our years it was brought to us that war is the game of youth.
We were two middle-aged old coots--though still in our forties and
not altogether blind to a pretty face--and yet the oldest people
on the boat. Even the altruistic side of war is the game of youth.

Perhaps it is the other way around, and maybe youth is the only game
in the world worth playing and that the gains of youth, service and
success and follies and failures, are only the chips and counters.
We were brought to these conclusions more or less by a young person,