“Thought you looked a bit like it,” said the girl. “I’m in the chorus. It’s better than being in service or in a shop: that’s all you can say for it.” Years afterwards, listening to the overture to Tannhäuser, there came back to her the memory of that night. Ever through the mad Satanic discords she could hear, now faint, now conquering, the Pilgrims’ onward march. So through the jangled discords of the world one heard the Song of Life. Through the dim aeons of man’s savage infancy; through the centuries of bloodshed and of horror; through the dark ages of tyranny and superstition; through wrong, through cruelty, through hate; heedless of doom, heedless of death, still the nightingale’s song: “I love you. I love you. I love you. We will build a nest. We will rear our brood. I love you. I love you. Life shall not die.”!

“It would not do to tell the truth, or we should have our children growing up to hate war,” she concluded. “I would like to go back,” she said.

“So I do,” Joan defended herself. “I’m in and out there till I’m sick of the hideous place. You haven’t seen the inside. And his wife knows all about it, and is only too glad.” “You don’t mean a party?” asked Joan. “I wonder,” he said. “You could hardly be your mother’s daughter without it.”