“And when Hilda sets her mind on a thing—.  Oh, I can’t seem to talk of anything but Hilda—­when she sets her mind on anything, she gets it in one way or another—­and that’s why I am afraid of her.”

Derry wrote back.

“Don’t be afraid of anything, Jean-Joan.  And it won’t do any good to talk to Hilda.  I don’t want you to talk to her.  You are too much of a white angel to contend against the powers of darkness.

“As for my luck in having you, it is something which transcends luck—­it just hits the stars, dearest.

“I wonder what the fellows do who haven’t any wives to anchor themselves to in a time like this?  Through, all the day I have this hour in mind when I can write to you—­and I think there are lots of other fellows like that—­for I can see them all about me here in the Hut, bending over their letters with a look on their faces which isn’t there at any other time.

“By Jove, Jean-Joan, I never knew before what women meant in the lives of men.  Here we are marooned, as it were, on an island of masculinity, yet it isn’t what the other fellows think of us that counts, it is what you think who are miles away.  Always in the back of our minds is the thought of what you expect of us and demand of us, and added to what we demand and expect of ourselves, it sways us level.  We don’t talk a great deal about you, but now and then some fellow says, ‘My wife,’ and we all prick up our ears and want to hear the rest of it.

“It is a great life, dearest, in spite of the hard work, in spite of the stress and strain.  And to me who have known so little of the great human game it is a great revelation.

“In the first place, there has been brought to me the knowledge of the joy of real labor.  I shall never again be sorry for the man who toils.  You see, I had never toiled, not in the sense that a man does whose labor counts.  I was always a rather anxious and lonely little boy, looking after my father and trying to help my mother, and feeling a bit of a mollycoddle because I had a tutor and did not go to school with the other chaps.  In the eyes of the world I was looked upon as a lucky fellow, but I know now what I have missed.  In these days I am rubbing elbows with fellows who have had to hustle, and I am discovering that life is a great game, and that I have missed the game.  If Dad had been different, he might have pushed me into things, as some men with money push their sons, making them stand on their own feet.  But Dad liked an easy life, and he was perhaps entitled to ease, for he had struggled in his younger years.  But I have never struggled.  I have always had somebody to brush my clothes and to bring my breakfast, and I think I have had a sort of hazy idea that life was like that for everybody—­or if it wasn’t, then the people who couldn’t be brushed and breakfasted by others were much to be pitied.

“Oh, I’ve been a Tin Soldier, Jean-Joan, left out not only of the war but of life.  I’ve been on the shelf all these years in our big house, with the wooden trumpets blowing, ‘Trutter-a-trutt’ while other men have striven.