"No. I don't feel any great necessity for justifying my actions. No more than you should feel compelled to justify yours. We have each only done what normal human beings frequently do when they get torn loose from the moorings they know and are moved by forces within them and beyond them, forces which bewilder and dismay them. The war and your idea of duty, of service, pried us apart. Natural causes—natural enough when I look back at them—did the rest. We all want to be happy. We all grab at that when it comes within reach. That's all you and I have done. We will probably continue doing that the same as every one else."
"I have it," Hollister said defiantly. "That is why I don't want any ghosts of the old days haunting me now."
"If you have, you are very fortunate," she murmured. "But don't leave your wife alone in a city throbbing with the fevered excitement and uncertainty of war, where every one's motto is a short life and a merry one! Not if she's young and hot-blooded, if she has grown so accustomed to affection and caresses that the want of them afflicts her with a thirst like that of a man lost in a desert. Because if she has nothing to do but live from day to day on memories and hopes, there will be a time when some man at hand will obscure the figure of the absent one. That is all that happened to me, Robin. I longed for you. Then I began to resent your complete absorption by the war machine. Then you got dim, like the figure of a man walking away down a long road. Do you remember how it was? Leave once in six months or so. A kiss of welcome and a good-by right on its heels. There were thousands like me in London. The war took our men—but took no account of us. We were untrained. There were no jobs to occupy our hands—none we could put our hearts into—none that could be gotten without influence in the proper quarters. We couldn't pose successfully enough to persuade ourselves that it was a glorious game. They had taken our men, and there was nothing much left. We did not have to earn our keep. If you had only not stuck so closely to the front lines."
"I had to," Hollister said sharply. "I had no choice. The country——"
"The country! That shadowy phantasm—that recruiting sergeant's plea—that political abstraction that is flung in one's face along with other platitudes from every platform," Myra broke out passionately. "What does it really mean? What did it mean to us? Men going out to die. Women at home crying, eating their hearts out with loneliness, going bad now and then in recklessness, in desperation. Army contractors getting rich. Ammunition manufacturers getting rich. Transportation companies paying hundred per cent. dividends. One nation grabbing for territory here, another there. Talk of saving the world for democracy and in the same breath throttling liberty of speech and action in every corner of the world. And now that it's all over, everything is the same, only worse. The rich are richer and the poor poorer, and there are some new national boundaries and some blasted military and political reputations. That's all. What was that to you and me? Nothing. Less than nothing. Yet it tore our lives up by the roots. It took away from us something we had that we valued, something that we might have kept. It doesn't matter that you were sincere, that you wanted to serve, that you thought it a worthy service. The big people, the men who run things, they had no such illusions; they had their eye on the main chance all the time. It paid them—if not in money then in prestige and power. How has it paid you? You know, every time you look in a mirror. You know that the men that died were the lucky ones. The country that marched them to the front with speeches and music when the guns were talking throws them on the scrapheap when they come back maimed. I have no faith in a country that takes so much and gives a little so grudgingly. I've learned to think, Robin, and perhaps it has warped me a little. You have suffered. So have I, partly because I was ignorant of the nature I was born with, which you didn't understand and which I'm only myself beginning to understand—but mostly because the seats of the mighty were filled by fools and hypocrites seeking their own advantage. Oh, life is a dreary business sometimes! We want so to be happy. We try so hard. And mostly we fail."
Her eyes filled with tears, round drops that gathered slowly in the corners of her puckered lids and spilled over the soft curves of her cheek. She did not look at Hollister. She stared at the gray river. She made a little gesture, as if she dumbly answered some futile question, and her hands dropped idly into her lap.
"I feel guilty," she continued after a little, "not because I failed to play up to the rôle of the faithful wife. I couldn't help that. But I shouldn't have kept that money, I suppose. Still, you were dead. Money meant nothing to you. It was in my hands and I needed it, or thought I did. You must have had a hard time, Robin, coming back to civil life a beggar."
"Yes, but not for lack of money," Hollister replied. "I didn't need much and I had enough. It was being scarred so that everybody shunned me. It was the horror of being alone, of finding men and women always uneasy in my presence, always glad to get away from me. They acted as if I were a monstrosity that offended them beyond endurance. I couldn't blame them much. Sometimes it gave me the shivers to look at myself in the glass. I am a horrible sight. People who must be around me seem to get used to me, whether they like it or not. But at first I nearly went mad. I had been uprooted and disfigured. Nobody wanted to know me, to talk to me, to be friendly. However, that's past. I have got a start. Unless this skeleton is dragged out of the closet, I shall get on well enough."
"I shall not drag it out, Robin," she assured him with a faint smile. "Some day I hope I'll be able to give you back that money."
"What became of it?" He voiced a question which had been recurring in his mind for a year. "You must have had over forty thousand dollars when I was reported dead in '17."