He scribbled these ideas in his first letter to Joan, and they pleased her mightily. To fly with Peter would be surely to fly straight into heaven.
And mixed up with Joan’s letters were others that he presently sorted out from hers and put apart, as though even letters might hold inconvenient communion. For the most part they came from Hetty Reinhart, and displayed the emotions of a consciously delicious female enamoured and enslaved by one of the heroes of the air. She had dreamt of him coming in through the skylight of her studio, Lord Cupid visiting his poor little Psyche—“but it was only the moonlight,” and she thought of him now always with great overshadowing wings. Sometimes they were great white wings that beat above her, and sometimes they were thrillingly soft and exquisite wings, like the wings of the people in Peter Wilkins. She sent him a copy of Peter Wilkins, book beloved by Poe and all readers of the fantastic. Then came the news of his smash. She had been clever enough to link it with the death of von Papen, the Hun Matador. “Was that your fight, dear Peterkins? Did you begin on Goliath?” As the cordials of recovery raced through Peter’s veins there were phases when the thought of visiting the yielding fair, Jovelike and triumphant in winged glory, became not simply attractive but insistent. But he wrote to Hetty modestly, “They’ve clipped one wing for ever.”
And so in a quite artless and inevitable way Peter found his first leave, when the British hospital had done with him, mortgaged up to hilt almost equally to dear friend Joan and to Cleopatra Hetty.
The young man only realized the duplicity of his nature and the complications of his position as the hospital boat beat its homeward way across the Channel. The night was smooth and fine, with a high full moon which somehow suggested Hetty, and with a cloud scheme of great beauty and distinction that had about it a flavour of Joan. And as he meditated upon these complications that had been happening in his more personal life while his attention had been still largely occupied with divinity and politics, he was hailed by an unfamiliar voice and addressed as “Simon Peter.” “Excuse me,” said the stout young officer tucked up warmly upon the next deck chair between a pair of crutches, “but aren’t you Simon Peter?”
Peter had heard that name somewhere before. “My name’s Stubland,” he said.
“Ah! Stubland! I forgot your surname. Of High Cross School?”
Peter peered and saw a round fair face that slowly recalled memories. “Wait a moment!” said Peter.... “Ames!”
“Guessed it in one. Probyn and I were chums.”
“What have you got?” said Peter.
“Leg below the knee off, damn it!” said Ames. “One month at the front. Not much of a career. But they say they do you a leg now better than reality. But I’d have liked to have batted the pants of the unspeakable Hun a bit more before I retired. What have you got?”