"I wish you were not going to the war," she said unexpectedly. It had come home to her, all at once, the potentialities of that trim uniform. It made her a little sick.
"It's nice of you to say that."
There was a new mood on her, of confession, almost of consecration. He asked her if he might smoke. No one in her brief life had ever before asked her permission to smoke.
"I'll have to smoke all I can," he said. "The fellows say cigarettes are scarce in the trenches. I'm taking a lot over."
He knew a girl who smoked cigarettes, he said. She was a nice girl too. He couldn't understand it. The way he felt about it, maybe a cigarette for a girl wasn't a crime. But it led to other things—drinking, you know, and all that.
"The fellows don't respect a girl that smokes," he said. "That's the plain truth. I've talked to her a lot about it."
"It wasn't your friend in Toronto, was it?"
"Good heavens, no!" He repudiated the idea with horror.
It was the girl who had to readjust her ideas of life that day. She had been born and raised in that neutral ground between the lines of right and wrong, and now suddenly her position was attacked and she must choose sides. She chose.
"I've smoked a cigarette now and then. If you think it is wrong I'll not do it any more."