We Cant Have Everything | Page 4

and more strength than
even you've got in a slaughter-house of a war hospital. How did you
stand it?"
"It wasn't much fun," she sighed, "but the nurses can't feel sorry 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 débris 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."
"I won't let you go back!" He checked himself. He had no right to
dictate to her. He amended to: "You mustn't. It's dangerous crossing,
with all those submarines and floating mines. You've done your bit and
more."
"But there's so horribly much to do."
"You've done enough. How many children have you got now?"
"About a hundred."
"Holy mother!" he whispered, with a profane piety. "Can even you
afford as big a family as that?"
"Well, I've had to call for some help."
"Let me chip in? Will you?"
"Sure I will. Go as far as you like."
"All right; it's a bet. Name the sum, and I'll mail it to you."
"You'd better not mail me anything, Jim" she said.
He blenched and mumbled: "Oh, all right! I'll write you a check now."
"Later," she said. "I don't like to talk much about such things, please."
"Promise me you won't go back."
She simply waived the theme: "Let's talk of something pleasant, if you
don't mind."

"Something pleasant, eh? Then I can't ask about--him, I suppose."
"Of course. Why not?"
"How is the hound?--begging the pardon of all honest hounds."
She was too sure of her own feelings toward her husband to feel it
necessary to rush to his defense--against a former rival. Her answer was,
"He's well enough to raise a handsome row if he saw you and me
together."
He grumbled a full double-barreled oath and did not apologize for it.
She spoke coldly:
"You'd better go back to your seat."
She was as severe as a woman can well be with a man who adores her
and writhes with jealousy of a man she adores.
"I'll be good, Teacher," he said. "Was he over there with you?"
She evidently liked to talk about her husband. She brightened as she
spoke. "Yes, for a while. He drove a motor-ambulance, you know, but
it bored him after a month or two. They wouldn't let him up to the
firing-lines, so he quit. Have you seen him?"
"Once or twice."
"He's looking well, isn't he?"
"Yes, confound him! His handsome features have been my ruin."
She could smile at that inverted compliment. But Dyckman began to
think very hard. He was suddenly confronted with one of the
conundrums in duty which life incessantly propounds--life that squats
at all the crossroads with a sphinxic riddle for every wayfarer.

CHAPTER III
Kedzie--to say it again--did not know enough about New York or the
world to recognize Mrs. Cheever and Mr. Dyckman when she glanced
at them and glanced away. They did not at all come up to Kedzie's idea
or ideal of what swells should be, and she had not even grown up
enough to study the society news that makes such thrilling reading to
those who thrill to that sort of thing. The society notes in the town
paper in Kedzie's town (Nimrim, Missouri) consisted of bombastic
chronicles of church sociables or lists of those present at
surprise-parties.
This girl's home was one of the cheapest in that cheap town. Her people
not only were poor, but lived more poorly than they had to. They had,
in consequence, a little reserve of funds, which they took pride in
keeping up. The