"I know," she said, "I can sympathize with you. I also had my dreams, my aspirations. But you are wrong to think that you have failed. Why, this beautiful work of yours, it all is Art—pure Art. No person who really knows could look at it and not see that. No, Mr. Pulford, you do yourself an injustice; believe me, you do. Why, you couldn't help being an artist if you tried; it's born in you. It shows in everything you do. I saw it from the very first."
The unmistakable sound of Dwight Ransom's large artillery boots moving on the floor outside intervened here, and Marsena hurriedly opened the door. The Lieutenant glanced with good-natured raillery at the couple who stood revealed, blinking in the sharp light.
"One of my legs got asleep," he remarked, by way of explanation, "so I had to get up and stamp around. I began to think," he added, "that you folks were going to set up housekeeping in there, and not come out any more at all."
"Don't be vulgar, if you please," said Julia Parmalee, with a dash of asperity in what purported to be a bantering tone. "We were talking of matters quite beyond you—of Art, if you desire to know. Mr. Pulford and I discover that we have a great many opinions and sentiments about Art in common. It is a feeling that no one can understand unless they have it."
"It's the same with getting one's leg asleep," said Dwight, "quite the same, I assure you;" and then came the laughter which Newton Shull heard downstairs.
III.
A day or two later Battery G left Octavius for the seat of war.
It was not nearly so imposing an event as a good many others which had stirred the community during the previous twelve months. There were already two regiments in the field recruited from our end of Dearborn County, and in these at least six or seven companies were made up wholly of Octavius men. There had been big crowds, with speeches and music by the band, to see them off at the old depot.
When they returned, their short term of service having expired, there were still more fervent demonstrations, to which zest was added by the knowledge that they were all to enlist again, and then we shortly celebrated their second departure. Some there were who returned in mute and cold finality—term of enlistment and life alike cut short—and these were borne through our streets with sombre martial pageantry, the long wail of the funeral march reaching out to include the whole valley side in its note of lamentation. Besides all this, hardly a week passed that those of us who hung about the station could not see a train full of troops on their way to or from the South. A year of these experiences had left us seasoned veterans in sightseeing, by no means to be fluttered by trifles.