Since Annette knew my story, or part of it, I thought it no harm to ask, “To what do you attribute it?”
But Annette refused to lend herself to my game.
“I attribute it to her getting over the long strain. It’s natural that you people who’ve been over there should be dazed or jumpy or something. She’s been dazed.”
“And what do you think I’ve been?”
“Oh, you’ve been the same,” she laughed; “but then, you’re always queer.”
CHAPTER XXIX
The news with regard to Regina acted on me as a twofold stimulus.
In the first place, it sent me back at last to the Down and Out. If she had waked, I, too, would wake; and since she was actively pleading the great cause, I would do the same. I didn’t go to a meeting, but dropped in during a forenoon. The house was even humbler and dingier than I remembered it, but as scrupulously neat and clean. In the back sitting-room were half a dozen men, all of the type to which I had once belonged and with whom I felt a sympathy so overwhelming as to surprise myself. Perhaps because I had seen so much of what could be made of human material even when it was destined to be no more than cannon fodder in the end, I was sorry to see this waste.