They did not notify Jo of their coming.  Eva telephoned his apartment when she knew he would be out, and asked his man if he expected his master home to dinner that evening.  The man had said yes.  Eva arranged to meet Stell in town.  They would drive to Jo’s apartment together, and wait for him there.

When she reached the city Eva found turmoil there.  The first of the American troops to be sent to France were leaving.  Michigan Boulevard was a billowing, surging mass:  Flags, pennants, banners crowds.  All the elements that make for demonstration.  And over the whole—­quiet.  No holiday crowd, this.  A solid, determined mass of people waiting patient hours to see the khaki-clads go by.  Three years of indefatigable reading had brought them to a clear knowledge of what these boys were going to.

“Isn’t it dreadful!” Stell gasped.

“Nicky Overton’s only nineteen, thank goodness.”

Their car was caught in the jam.  When they moved at all it was by inches.  When at last they reached Jo’s apartment they were flushed, nervous, apprehensive.  But he had not yet come in.  So they waited.

No, they were not staying to dinner with their brother, they told the relieved houseman.

Jo’s home has already been described to you.  Stell and Eva, sunk in rose-coloured cushions, viewed it with disgust, and some mirth.  They rather avoided each other’s eyes.

“Carrie ought to be here,” Eva said.  They both smiled at the thought of the austere Carrie in the midst of those rosy cushions, and hangings, and lamps.  Stell rose and began to walk about, restlessly.  She picked up a vase and laid it down; straightened a picture.  Eva got up, too, and wandered into the hall.  She stood there a moment, listening.  Then she turned and passed into Jo’s bedroom.  And there you knew Jo for what he was.

This room was as bare as the other had been ornate.  It was Jo, the clean-minded and simple-hearted, in revolt against the cloying luxury with which he had surrounded himself.  The bedroom, of all rooms in any house, reflects the personality of its occupant.  True, the actual furniture was panelled, cupid-surmounted, and ridiculous.  It had been the fruit of Jo’s first orgy of the senses.  But now it stood out in that stark little room with an air as incongruous and ashamed as that of a pink tarleton danseuse who finds herself in a monk’s cell.  None of those wall-pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to be hung.  No satin slippers.  No scented notes.  Two plain-backed military brushes on the chiffonier (and he so nearly hairless!).  A little orderly stack of books on the table near the bed.  Eva fingered their titles and gave a little gasp.  One of them was on gardening.

“Well, of all things!” exclaimed Stell.  A book on the War, by an Englishman.  A detective story of the lurid type that lulls us to sleep.  His shoes ranged in a careful row in the closet, with a shoe-tree in every one of them.  There was something speaking about them.  They looked so human.  Eva shut the door on them, quickly.  Some bottles on the dresser.  A jar of pomade.  An ointment such as a man uses who is growing bald and is panic-stricken too late.  An insurance calendar on the wall.  Some rhubarb-and-soda mixture on the shelf in the bathroom, and a little box of pepsin tablets.