for themselves when they see--what they see."

"I can imagine," he said.

But he could not have imagined her as she daily had been. She and
the other princesses of blood royal or bourgeois had been moiling
among the red human debris of war, the living garbage of battle,
as the wagons and trains emptied it into the receiving stations.

She and they had stood till they slept standing. They had done
harder, filthier jobs than the women who worked in machine-shops and
in furrows, while the male-kind fought. She had gone about bedabbled
in blood, her hair drenched with it. Her delicate hands had performed
tasks that would have been obscene if they had not been sublime
in a realm of suffering where nothing was obscene except the cause
of it all.

She sickened at it more in retrospect than in action, and tried
to shake it from her mind by a change of subject.

"And what have you been up to, Jim?"

"Ah, nothing but the same old useless loafing. Been up in the North
Woods for some hunting and fishing," he snarled. His voice always
grew contemptuous when he spoke of himself, but idolatrous when
he spoke of her--as now when he asked: "I heard you had gone back
abroad. But you're not going, are you?"

"Yes, as soon as I get my nerves a little steadier."