He felt that in some way the thing was all wrong.  There should have been big things for these boys to do.  There seemed something insensate in a civilization which would permit a man who wore medals of honor to sell ribbon over a counter, or weigh out beef at a butcher’s.  Yet he supposed that many of them were doing it.  Indeed he knew that some of them were.  The butcher’s boy, who brought the meat over every morning to King’s Crest, wore two decorations, and when Randy had stopped for breakfast supplies, the hero of Belleau Woods had cut off sausages as calmly as he had once bayonetted Huns.

Randy wondered what the butcher’s boy was feeling under that apparently stolid surface.  Was his horizon bounded by beef and sausages, or did his soul expand with memories of the shoulder-to-shoulder march, the comradeship of the trenches, the laughter and songs?  Did his pulses thrill with the thought of the big things he might yet do in these days of peace, or was he content to play safe and snip sausages?

Randy felt that he was not content.  It was not that he loved war.  But he loved the visions that the war had brought him.  There had seemed no limit then to America’s achievement.  She had been a laggard—­he thanked God that he had not been a party to that delay.  But when she had come in, she had come in with all her might and main.  And her young men had fought and the future of the whole world had been in their hands, and since peace had come the future of the world must still be reckoned in the terms of their glorious youth.

And now, something within Randy began to sing and soar.  He felt that here were things to be put on paper—­the questions which he flung at himself should be written for other men to read.  That was what men needed—­questions.  Questions which demanded answers not only in words but in deeds.  This was a moment for men of high thoughts and high purposes.

And he was selling cars——!

Well, some day he would write.  He was writing a little now, at night.  In his room at the top of the Schoolhouse.  Yet the things that he had written seemed trivial as he thought of them.  What he wanted was to strike a ringing note.  To have the fellows say when they read it, “If it is true for him it is true for me.”

Yet when one came to think of it, there were really not any “fellows.”  Not in the sense that it had been “over there.”  They were scattered to the four winds, dispersed to the seven seas—­the A. E. F. was extinct—­as extinct—­as the Trumpeter Swan!

And now his thoughts ran fast, and faster.  Here was his theme.  Where was that glorious company of young men who had once sounded their trumpets to the world?  Gone, as the swans were gone—­leaving the memory of their whiteness—­leaving the memory of their beauty—­leaving the memory of their—­song——­

He wanted to turn back at once.  To drive Little Sister at breakneck speed towards pen and paper.  But some instinct drove him doggedly towards the matter on hand.  One might write masterpieces, but there were cars to be sold.