"I am ashamed ... don't know how to look people in the face.... I never thought to be so utterly unhappy. I am thirty and useless. I cumber the ground."
The look of surprise with which his friend turned to him hurt him like the cut of a whip. "Of course you can't help," it seemed to say. "The world is for the strong, this year and the next, and for how many more?"
Strange had to lie on his back for some hours each day, and he suffered off and on always. But that had been his lot since boyhood, and he had made light of his infirmity and grown used to it until this 4th of August. He had consoled himself with the knowledge that to the world he looked only rather delicate. He was tall, and not set apart from his fellows.
"Now," he said. "I wish that everybody knew. Yes, I wish that I showed that service was impossible. To think of us sitting here round a dinner-table--as we used to! Oh, I know what you'll think! I have the morbid sensitiveness of sick men. Perhaps you are right."
"I don't think it at all," she said, and she set herself to comfort him.
Strange went from the dinner-party to his club. There was the inevitable crowd, fighting the campaign differently, cutting up the conquered countries, or crying all was lost. Some of them had written to the papers, all were somehow swollen with importance as though the war was their private property. Strange began to take heart.
"They are not ashamed," he thought. "They speak to me as if they expected I should be here. Perhaps I am a fool."
A friend sat down by his side.
"Cross went yesterday," he said. "George Crawley was killed at Mons. Of course you have heard."
Strange had not heard, and there rose before his eyes suddenly a picture of George Crawley, the youngest colonel in the army, standing on the kerb in St. James's Street and with uplifted face blaspheming to the skies at one o'clock in the morning because of a whiskered degenerate dandy with a frilled shirt to whom he had just before been introduced. But his friend was continuing his catalogue.