you got dim, like the figure of a man walking away down a long road.  Do you remember how it was?  Leave once in six months or so.  A kiss of welcome and a good-by right on its heels.  There were thousands like me in London.  The war took our men—­but took no account of us.  We were untrained.  There were no jobs to occupy our hands—­none we could put our hearts into—­none that could be gotten without influence in the proper quarters.  We couldn’t pose successfully enough to persuade ourselves that it was a glorious game.  They had taken our men, and there was nothing much left.  We did not have to earn our keep.  If you had only not stuck so closely to the front lines.”

“I had to,” Hollister said sharply.  “I had no choice.  The country——­”

“The country!  That shadowy phantasm—­that recruiting sergeant’s plea—­that political abstraction that is flung in one’s face along with other platitudes from every platform,” Myra broke out passionately.  “What does it really mean?  What did it mean to us?  Men going out to die.  Women at home crying, eating their hearts out with loneliness, going bad now and then in recklessness, in desperation.  Army contractors getting rich.  Ammunition manufacturers getting rich.  Transportation companies paying hundred per cent. dividends.  One nation grabbing for territory here, another there.  Talk of saving the world for democracy and in the same breath throttling liberty of speech and action in every corner of the world.  And now that it’s all over, everything is the same, only worse.  The rich are richer and the poor poorer, and there are some new national boundaries and some blasted military and political reputations.  That’s all.  What was that to you and me?  Nothing.  Less than nothing.  Yet it tore our lives up by the roots.  It took away from us something we had that we valued, something that we might have kept.  It doesn’t matter that you were sincere, that you wanted to serve, that you thought it a worthy service.  The big people, the men who run things, they had no such illusions; they had their eye on the main chance all the time.  It paid them—­if not in money then in prestige and power.  How has it paid you?  You know, every time you look in a mirror.  You know that the men that died were the lucky ones.  The country that marched them to the front with speeches and music when the guns were talking throws them on the scrapheap when they come back maimed.  I have no faith in a country that takes so much and gives a little so grudgingly.  I’ve learned to think, Robin, and perhaps it has warped me a little.  You have suffered.  So have I, partly because I was ignorant of the nature I was born with, which you didn’t understand and which I’m only myself beginning to understand—­but mostly because the seats of the mighty were filled by fools and hypocrites seeking their own advantage.  Oh, life is a dreary business sometimes!  We want so to be happy.  We try so hard.  And mostly we fail.”