Lane, with his two comrades, spent three days at a barracks-hospital for soldiers in Bedford Park.  It was a long flimsy structure, bare except for rows of cots along each wall, and stoves at middle, and each end.  The place was overcrowded with disabled service men, all worse off than Lane and his comrades.  Lane felt that he really was keeping a sicker man than himself from what attention the hospital afforded.  So he was glad, at the end of the third day, to find they could be discharged from the army.

This enforced stay, when he knew he was on his way home, had seemed almost unbearable to Lane.  He felt that he had the strength to get home, and that was about all.  He began to expectorate blood—­no unusual thing for him—­but this time to such extent that he feared the return of hemorrhage.  The nights seemed sleepless, burning, black voids; and the days were hideous with noise and distraction.  He wanted to think about the fact that he was home—­an astounding and unbelievable thing.  Once he went down to the city and walked on Broadway and Fifth Avenue, taxing his endurance to the limit.  But he had become used to pain and exhaustion.  So long as he could keep up he did not mind.

That day three powerful impressions were forced upon Lane, never to be effaced.  First he found that the change in him was vast and incalculable and vague.  He could divine but not understand.  Secondly, the men of the service, disabled or not, were old stories to New Yorkers.  Lane saw soldiers begging from pedestrians.  He muttered to himself:  “By God, I’ll starve to death before I ever do that!” He could not detect any aloofness on the part of passers-by.  They were just inattentive.  Lane remembered with sudden shock how differently soldiers had been regarded two or three years ago.  He had read lengthy newspaper accounts of the wild and magnificent welcome accorded to the first soldiers to return to New York.  How strange the contrast!  But that was long ago—­past history—­buried under the immense and hurried and inscrutable changes of a nation.  Lane divined that, as he felt the mighty resistless throb of the great city.  His third and strongest impression concerned the women he met and passed on the streets.  Their lips and cheeks were rouged.  Their dresses were cut too low at the neck.  But even this fashion was not nearly so striking as the short skirts, cut off at the knees, and in many cases above.  At first this roused a strange amaze in Lane.  “What’s the idea, I wonder?” he mused.  But in the end it disgusted him.  He reflected that for two swift years he had been out of the track of events, away from centers of population.  Paris itself had held no attraction for him.  Dreamer and brooder, he had failed to see the material things.  But this third impression troubled him more than the other two and stirred thoughts he tried to dispel.  Returning to the barracks he learned that he and his friends would be free on the morrow; and long into