“Not palaces like yours,” repeated Mr. Cameron, “and not hovels.  But mostly self-respecting houses, the homes of the plain people.  The middle class, Miss Cardew.  My class.  The people who never say anything, but are squeezed between capital, represented by your grandfather, with its parasites, represented by you, and—­”

“You represent the people who never say anything,” observed the slightly flushed parasite of capital, “about as adequately as I represent the idle rich.”

Yet not even old Anthony could have resented the actual relationship between them.  Lily Cardew, working alone in her hut among hundreds of men, was as without sex consciousness as a child.  Even then her flaming interest was in the private soldiers.  The officers were able to amuse themselves; they had money and opportunity.  It was the doughboys she loved and mothered.  For them she organized her little entertainments.  For them she played and sang in the evenings, when the field range in the kitchen was cold, and her blistered fingers stumbled sometimes over the keys of the jingling camp piano.

Gradually, out of the chaos of her early impressions, she began to divide the men in the army into three parts.  There were the American born; they took the war and their part in it as a job to be done, with as few words as possible.  And there were the foreigners to whom America was a religion, a dream come true, whose flaming love for their new mother inspired them to stuttering eloquence and awkward gestures.  And then there was a third division, small and mostly foreign born, but with a certain percentage of native malcontents, who hated the war and sneered among themselves at the other dupes who believed that it was a war for freedom.  It was a capitalists’ war.  They considered the state as an instrument of oppression, as a bungling interference with liberty and labor; they felt that wealth inevitably brought depravity.  They committed both open and overt acts against discipline, and found in their arrest and imprisonment renewed grievances, additional oppression, tyranny.  And one day a handful of them, having learned Lily’s identity, came into her hut and attempted to bait her.

“Gentlemen,” said one of them, “we have here an example of one of the idle rich, sacrificing herself to make us happy.  Now, boys, be happy.  Are we all happy?” He surveyed the group.  “Here, you,” he addressed a sullen-eyed squat Hungarian.  “Smile when I tell you.  You’re a slave in one of old Cardew’s mills, aren’t you?  Well, aren’t you grateful to him?  Here he goes and sends his granddaughter—­”

Willy Cameron had entered the room with a platter of doughnuts in his hand, and stood watching, his face going pale.  Quite suddenly there was a crash, and the gang leader went down in a welter of porcelain and fried pastry.  Willy Cameron was badly beaten up, in the end, and the beaters were court-martialed.  But something of Lily’s fine faith in humanity was gone.