it was his own affair.  The luxuries mean more than the necessities to plenty of us.  With comfort in this, his small luxury, he watched the play of light and shadow, and the pulsing of the live scarlet and orange in the heart of the coals.  He needed comfort today, the lonely boy.  Two men of the office force who had gotten their commissions lately at an officer’s training-camp had come in last night before leaving for Camp Devens; everybody had crowded about and praised them and envied them.  They had been joked about the sweaters, and socks made by mothers and sweethearts, and about the trouble Uncle Sam would have with their mass of mail.  The men in the office had joined to give each a goodbye present.  Pride in them, the honor of them to all the force was shown at every turn; and beyond it all there was the look of grave contentment in their eyes which is the mark of the men who have counted the cost and given up everything for their country.  Most of all soldiers, perhaps, in this great war, the American fights for an ideal.  Also he knows it; down to the most ignorant drafted man, that inspiration has lifted the army and given it a star in the East to follow.  The American fights for an ideal; the sign of it is in the faces of the men in uniform whom one meets everywhere in the street.

David Lance, splendidly powerful and fit except for the small limp which was his undoing, suffered as he joined, whole-hearted, in the glory of those who were going.  Back in his room alone, smoking, staring into his dying fire, he was dreaming how it would feel if he were the one who was to march off in uniform to take his man’s share of the hardship and comradeship and adventure and suffering, and of the salvation of the world.  With that, he took his pipe from his mouth and grinned broadly into the fire as another phase of the question appeared.  How would it feel if he was somebody’s special soldier, like both of those boys, sent off by a mother or a sweetheart, by both possibly, overstocked with things knitted for him, with all the necessities and luxuries of a soldier’s outfit that could be thought of.  He remembered how Jarvis, the artillery captain, had showed them, proud and modest, his field glass.

“It’s a good one,” he had said.  “My mother gave it to me.  It has the Mills scale.”

And Annesley, the kid, who had made his lieutenant’s commission so unexpectedly, had broken in:  “That’s no shakes to the socks I’ve got on.  If somebody’ll pull off my boots I’ll show you.  Made in Poughkeepsie.  A dozen pairs. Not my mother.”

Lance smiled wistfully.  Since his own mother died, eight years ago, he had drifted about unanchored, and though women had inevitably held out hands to the tall and beautiful lad, they were not the sort he cared for, and there had been none of his own sort in his life.  Fate might so easily have given him a chance to serve his country, with also, maybe, just the common sweet things added which utmost every