beginning to articulate the engines of war—engines to mill and print out hatred and falsehood, engines to pump up glory, engines to manacle and crush opposition, engines to drill and regiment men.
But something of true wonder had come upon the land—the flares and rockets of the battle-fields cast their light across the plains as well. Young men from Kansas were going to die in Picardy. In some foreign earth lay the iron, as yet unmoulded, that was to slay them. The strangeness of death and destiny was legible upon lives and faces which held no strangeness of their own. For, it is the union of the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.
Luke had gone away to the training-school at Newport. Ben went to Baltimore with Helen and Gant, who, before entering the hospital again for radium treatment, had gone on a violent and unruly spree which had compelled their rapid transference from one hotel to another and had finally brought Gant moaning to his bed, hurling against God the anathemas that should have been saved for huge riotings in raw oysters washed down chaotically with beer and whisky. They all drank a great deal: Gant’s excesses, however, reduced the girl to a state of angry frenzy, and Ben to one of scowling and cursing disgust.
“You damned old man!” cried Helen, seizing and shaking his passive shoulders as he lay reeking and sodden on an untidy bed. “I could wear you out! You’re not sick; I’ve wasted my life nursing you, and you’re not as sick as I am! You’ll be here long after I’m gone, you selfish old man! It makes me furious!”
“Why, baby!” he roared, with a vast gesture of his arms, “God bless you, I couldn’t do without you.”
“Don’t’baby’me!” she cried.
But she held his hand next day as they rode out to the hospital, held it as, quaking, he turned for an instant and looked sadly at the city stretched behind and below him.
“I was a boy here,” he muttered.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “we’re going to make you well again. Why! You’ll be a boy again!”
Hand in hand they entered the lobby where, flanked with death and terror and the busy matter-of-factness of the nurses and
