“You’re sure?” he said. Joan laughed. “You don’t somehow suggest the rat,” she said: “rather another sort of beast.”!

“I see your argument,” she said. “The more I love you, the deeper will be the fountain. So that the more Love I want to come to me, the more I must love you.” He turned to her with his last flicker of passion.

She saw the ditches, like long graves dug for the living, where the weary, listless men stood knee-deep in mud, hoping for wounds that would relieve them from the ghastly monotony of their existence; the holes of muddy water where the dead things lay, to which they crept out in the night to wash a little of the filth from their clammy bodies and their stinking clothes; the holes dug out of the mud in which they ate and slept and lived year after year: till brain and heart and soul seemed to have died out of them, and they remembered with an effort that they once were men. “I don’t know what made me think of you,” she said. “I’m so glad I did.” She gave the little old lady a hug. Mary laughed. “Where are you going now, dearie?” she asked. She met Carleton by chance a day or two later, as she was entering the office. “I want to see you,” he said; and took her up with him into his room.