“Yes,” said Henry; “one meets so many nice people on the boat.”

“Sometimes,” she answered, as she turned to her work.

That night we slept like logs until after midnight; then the moon rose, and the hospital began to come to life.  The stir and murmur of the place wakened us.  And we realized what a moonlight night means in a hospital near the front line.  It means terror.  No one slept after moonrise.  It was a new experience for Henry and me.  So we rose and met it.  And we realized that in scores of hospitals all over the war zone, on the side of the allies, similar scenes were enacting.  The Germans were literally tearing the nerves out of hundreds of nurses by their raiding campaign—­nurses whom the raiders did not visit, but who were threatened by every moonlight night!

It must have been after two in the morning, when we saw the Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth walking around the court as they used to pace the deck together.  Once or twice they passed our window, and we heard their voices.  They were having some sort of a tall talk on philosophical matters, which annoyed Henry.  The ocean and onion soup and philosophical theorizing never seemed reasonable, normal expressions of anything properly in the cosmos to Henry; he professed to believe that persons who tolerated these things would sooner or later be caught using the words “group” and “reaction” and “hypothesis,” and he would have none of them.  But for all that she used the word group and once confessed that she was a subscriber to the New Republic, Henry did like the Eager Soul; so he waked me up from a doze to say:  “Bill, she’s putting him through the eye of the needle all right.  And he’s sliding through slick as goose-grease.  I heard him telling her a minute ago that the war isn’t for boundaries and geography; but for a restatement of human creeds.  Then she said that steam and electricity have over-capitalized the world; that we are paying too highly for superintendence and that the price of superintendence must come down, and wages must come up.  Then he said that he and his class will go in the fires burning out there—­melted like wax.  And she told him that they both had a lot of stolen goods on them—­bodies and minds, and hearts cultivated at the expense of their fellow creatures whose lives had been narrowed that theirs might be broadened.  And you should have heard her talk about the Young Doctor—­a self-made man, who had earned his way through college and medical school, and made his own place professionally.  She said he was the Herald of the New Day.  Bill,” sighed Henry, “what would you give if you could talk like that—­again?” But from me, drowsily, came this:  “Henry—­do you suppose she will get around to that slapping tonight she promised him on the boat?  That would be worth staying up to see!”

“She’ll never slap him.  He’ll never need it.  She’s talked him clear out of the mood!”

“Yes, she has—­yes, she has,” came from me.  And Henry insisted: