But in Paris war met us far out in the suburbs, where at dusk a great flock of airplanes from a training camp buzzed over us and sailed along with the train, distancing us and returning to play with us like big sportive birds.  The train was filled with our shipmates from the boat and we all craned our necks from the windows to look at the wonderful sight of the air covey that fluttered above us.  Even the Eager Soul, our delicious young person with her crinkly red hair and serious eyes, disconnected herself long enough from the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor “for to admire and for to see,” the airplanes.

But the airplanes gave us the day’s first opportunity to talk to the Eager Soul.  Until dusk the Gilded Youth had kept her in his donjon—­a first class compartment jammed with hand-baggage, and where she had insisted that the Young Doctor should come also.  We knew that without being told; also it was evident as we passed up and down the car aisle during the day that she was acting as a sort of human Baedeker to the Young Doctor, while the Gilded Youth, to whom chateaux and French countryside were an old, old story, sat by and hooted.  But the airplanes pulled him out of his donjon keep and the Young Doctor with him.  He wasn’t above showing the Young Doctor how much a Gilded Youth really knows about mechanics and airplanes, and we slipped in and chatted with the Eager Soul.  We had a human interest in the contest between the Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor, and a sporting interest which centered in the daily score.  And we gathered this:  That it was the Young Doctor’s day.  For he was in France to help the greatest cause in the world; and the Gilded Youth affected to be in France—­to enjoy the greatest outdoor game in the world.  But he had made it plain that day to the Eager Soul that working eighteen hours a day under shell fire, driving an ambulance, was growing tame.  He was going back, of course, but he was thinking seriously of the air service.  The Doctor wanted no thrills.  He was willing to boil surgical instruments or squirt disinfectant around kitchens to serve.  And the Eager Soul liked that attitude, though it was obvious to us, that she was in the war game as a bit of a sport and because it was too dull in her Old Home Town, “somewhere in the United States.”  And we knew also what she did not admit, even if she recognized it, that in the Old Home Town, men of the sort to attract women of her spirit and intelligence were scarce—­and she was out looking for her own Sir Galahad, as he went up and down the earth searching for the Holy Grail.  The war to her, we knew, was a great opportunity to enjoy the new freedom of her sex, to lose her harem veil, to breathe free air as an achieving human creature—­but, alas! one’s forties are too wise.  Pretty as she was, innocent as she was, and eager as her soul was in high emprise of the conflict of world ideals into which she was plunging, we felt that, after all, hidden away deeply in the secret places of her heart, were a man and a home and children.