So Tish repeated it, but when she came to the eiderdown pillow he held up his hand.
“All right,” he said in a strange tone. “I believe you. I—you don’t mind if I go and get a drink of water, do you? My mouth is dry.”
Dear Tish watched him as he went away, and shook her head.
“He is changed already,” she observed sadly. “That is one of the deadliest effects of war. It takes the bright young spirit of youth and feeds it on stuff cooked by men, with not even time enough to chew properly, and puts it on its stomach in the mud, while its head is in the clouds of idealism. I think that a letter to the Secretary of War might be effective.”
I must admit that we had a series of disappointments that day. The first was in finding that they had put Tish’s nephew, a grandson of a former Justice of the Supreme Court, into a building with a number of other men. Not only that but without so much as a screen, or a closet in which to hang up his clothing.
“What do you mean, hang up my clothes?” he said when we protested. “They’re hung up all right—on me.”
“It seems rather terrible,” Aggie objected gently. “No privacy or anything.”
“Privacy! I haven’t got anything to hide.”
We found some little comfort, however, in the fact that beneath the pitiful cot that he called his bed he had a small tin trunk. Even that was destroyed, however, by the entrance of a thin young man called Smithers, who reached under the cot and dragging out the trunk proceeded to take out one of the pairs of socks that Aggie had knitted.
Charlie Sands paid no attention, but Tish fixed this person with a cold eye.