“Yes; being an officer and a gentleman, you can resign your commission, and have it perfectly regular.  Being that same officer and gentleman, you never were mugged—­treated as a prospective criminal; no four thousand posters bearing your picture will now be sent broadcast over the country; no fifty dollars is offered lean detectives for your capture; you’re in no chance of being thrown into prison and have your government do all in its power to wring the manhood out of you!  Oh no—­an officer and a gentleman—­you resign your commission and go ahead with your life.  But you’re leaving the army, aren’t you?  Deserting it.  And why?  Because you don’t like the spirit of it.  And yet—­though you’re too big for it—­though it’s time for you to desert—­you’re enough bound by it not to let the light of your intelligence fall for one single second on the question of desertion!”

She had held him.  He made no reply, looking in bewilderment at her red cheeks and blazing eyes.

Suddenly her face quivered.  “Wayne,” she said, “I don’t use the term as a hard name.  I’m not using it in just its technical sense, our army sense.  But mayn’t desertion be a brave thing?  A fine thing?  To desert a thing we’ve gone beyond—­to have the courage to desert it and walk right off from the dead thing to the live thing—?  Oh, don’t mind my calling you a deserter, Wayne,” she added, her eyes full of tears, “for the truth is I’d like to be a deserter myself.  But perhaps one deserter is enough for a family—­and you beat me to it.”  She laughed and turned back to the cabs.

He wanted to go on with the argument; show her what it was in desertion that army men despised, make the distinction between deserting and resigning.  But the truth was he was more interested in the things Katie had said than in the things which could be called in refutation.

And Katie puzzled him; her heat, feeling, not only astonished but worried him a little.  She was standing there now beating a tattoo on the window pane.  He wondered what she was thinking about.  The experience as to Ann revealed Katie to him as having thought about things he would not have dreamed she was thinking about.  What in the world did she mean by saying she’d like to be a deserter herself?  One of her preposterous sayings—­but it was true that considerable truth had often lurked at the heart of Katie’s absurd way of talking.

Watching her, he was drawn to thought of her attractiveness and that made him wonder whom Katie would marry.  He had always been secretly proud of his sister’s popularity; it seemed she should make a brilliant marriage.  Live brilliantly.  It was the thing to which she was adapted.  Katie was unique.  Distinctive.  Secretly, unadmittedly, he was very ambitious for her.  And with a little smile he considered that seemingly Katie was just shrewd enough to be ambitious for herself.  She had steered her little bark safely past the place where she would be likely to marry a lieutenant.  Was she heading for a general?