“Katie, you have the rich gift of the open mind.  I don’t believe that, lastingly, there’s anything you’ll shut out as impossible to consider.  Your eyes say it, Katie—­say they’ll look at everything, and just as fairly as they can.  Oh they’re such honest, fearless, just eyes—­so wise and so tender.  And it was I—­I who love them so—­brought that awful look of hurt to those wonderful eyes.  Katie—­I want to spend all of my life keeping that hurt look from those dear eyes!

“You’re asked to do a hard thing, dear Katie.  It’s cruel it should be you so hard a thing is asked of.  Asked to look at a thing you see through the feeling of a lifetime as though seeing it for the first time.  To look at all you’ve got to push aside things you regarded as fixed.  I suppose every one has something that to him seems the things unshakable, something he finds it terrifying to think of moving.  All your traditions, all your love and loyalty cling round this thing which it seems to you you can’t have touched.  But Katie, as you read these pages won’t you try to think of things, not as you’ve been told they were, but just as they seem to you from what you read?  Think of them, not in the old grooves, but just as it comes in to you as the story of a life?

“You’ll try to do that for me, won’t you, dear fair-minded, loving-spirited Katie?

“I was a country boy; lived on a farm, got lonesome, thought about things I had nobody to talk to about, read things and wanted more things to read, part the dreamer and part the great husky fellow wanting life, adventure, wanting to see things and know things—­most of all, experience things.  I want to tell you a lot about it sometime.  I can’t let go the idea that there is going to be a sometime.  Just because there’s so much to tell, if nothing else.  And, Katie, isn’t there something else?

“No way to begin the story of one’s life!

“Then I went away from home.  To see the world.  Try my fortune.  Experience.  Adventure.  That was the call.

“And the very first thing I fell in with that recruiting officer in the white suit.  I can see just how that fellow looked.  Get every intonation as he drew the glowing picture of life in the army.

“The army sounded good.  The army was experience, adventure, with a vengeance.  A life among men.  A chance.  He told me that an intelligent fellow like me would soon be an officer.  Of course I agreed perfectly I was an intelligent fellow, impressed with army intelligence in picking me for one.  Why I could see myself as commander-in-chief in no time!

“There’s the cruelty of it, Katie.  The expectation they rouse to get you—­the contemptuous treatment after they’ve got you.  The difference between the army of the ‘Men Wanted For the Army’ posters and the army those men find after those posters have done their work.