with his eyes and her tones with his ears and prayed that the situation might last a week. "You need me so, to tell you how much finer you are than if you'd gone off without a quiver." Barlow sighed in contentment. "And me thinking I was the solitary 'fraid-cat of America!" "Solitary! Why, Jim, there must be at least ten hundred thousand men going through this same battle. All the ones old enough to think, probably. Why Jim--you're only one of them. In that speech the other night the man said this war was giving men their souls. I think it's your kind he meant, the kind that realizes the bad things over there and the good things over here and goes just the same. The kind--you are." "I'm a hero from Hero-ville," murmured Barlow. "But little Mary, when I come back mangled will you feel the same? Will you marry me then, Mary?" "I'll marry you any minute," stated Mary, "and when you come back I'll love you one extra for every mangle." "Any minute," repeated Barlow dramatically. "Tomorrow?" And summed up again the heaven that he could not understand and did not want to, "Search me," he adjured the skies in good Americanese, "if girls aren't the blamedest." THE V.C. I had forgotten that I ordered frogs' legs. When mine were placed before me I laughed. I always laugh at the sight of frogs' legs because of the person and the day of which they remind me. Nobody noticed that I laughed or asked the reason why, though it was an audible chuckle, and though I sat at the head of my own dinner-party at the Cosmic Club. The man for whom the dinner was given, Colonel Robert Thornton, my cousin, a Canadian, who got his leg shot off at Vimy Ridge, was making oration about the German Crown Prince's tactics at Verdun, and that was the reason that ten men were not paying attention to me and that I was not paying attention to Bobby. When the good chap talks human talk, tells what happened to people and what their psychological processes seemed to be, he is entertaining. He has a genuine gift of sympathy and a power to lead others in the path he treads; in short, he tells a good story. But like most people who do one thing particularly well he is always priding himself on the way he does something else. He likes to look at Colonel Thornton as a student of the war, and he has the time of his life when he can get people to listen to what he knows Joffre and Foch and Haig and Hindenberg ought to have done. So at this moment he