The next day was uniform day on the boat, and the war came a bit nearer to us than ever.  Scores of good people who had come on the boat in civilian clothes, donned their uniforms that second day; mostly Red Cross or Y. M. C. A. or American ambulance or Field Service uniforms.  We did not don our uniforms, though Henry believed that we should at least have a dress rehearsal.  The only regular uniforms on board were worn by a little handful of French soldiers, straggling home from a French political mission to America, and these French soldiers were the only passengers on the boat who had errands to France connected with the destructive side of the war.  So not until the uniforms blazed out gorgeously did we realize what an elaborate and important business had sprung up in the reconstructive side of war.  Here we saw a whole ship’s company—­hundreds of busy and successful men and women, one of scores and scores of ship’s companies like it, that had been hurrying across the ocean every few days for three years, devoted not to trading upon the war, not to exploiting the war, not even to expediting the business of “the gentle art of murdering,” but devoted to saving the waste of war!

As the days passed, and “we sailed and we sailed,” a sort of denatured pirate craft armed to the teeth with healing lotions to massage the wrinkled front of war, Henry kept picking at the ocean.  It was his first transatlantic voyage; for like most American men, he kept his European experiences in his wife’s name.  So the ocean bothered him.  He understood a desert or a drouth, but here was a tremendous amount of unnecessary and unaccountable water.  It was a calm, smooth, painted ocean, and as he looked at it for a long time one day, Henry remarked wearily:  “The town boosters who secured this ocean for this part of the country rather overdid the job!”

One evening, looking back at the level floor of the ocean stretching illimitably into the golden sunset, he mused:  “They have a fine country here.  You kind of like the lay of it, and there is plenty of nice sightly real estate about—­it’s a gently rolling country, uneven and something like College Hill in Wichita, but there’s got to be a lot of money spent draining it; you can tell that at a glance, if the fellow gets anywhere with his proposition!”

[Illustration with caption:  “You’ll have to put out that cigar, sir.”]

A time always comes in a voyage, when men and women begin to step out as individuals from the mass.  With us it was the Red Cross stenographers and the American Ambulance boys who first ceased being ladyships and lordships and took their proper places in the cosmos.  They were a gay lot—­and young.  And human nature is human nature.  So the decks began to clutter up with boys and girls intensely interested in exploring each other’s lives.  It is after all the most wonderful game in the world.  And while the chaperon fluttered about more or less, trying to shoo the girls off the dark decks at night, and