I asked when he had married her, and who she was.
She had been visiting friends, he said, in Dubuque, when Corey came back, he believed, from the Balkan War, in the spring of 1913. Pretty quick work they made of it, too. In August that same summer they had the wedding at her house in Des Moines. But it had surprised nobody. They knew he’d been wanting to settle down; and she was just the right kind of girl—nice and wholesome, and fond of her home. At last, he said, he was going to begin to live.
He had dropped at once into his place, exactly as if he had never been away at all—as if, after his graduation, he had come home to practise his profession. There was nothing even about his house to indicate the traveler; no obtrusive trophies of strange lands; no bizarre knick-knacks. In a room in the attic were a half-full dunnage-bag, a traveler’s kit, and an officer’s trunk, small size, the lid pressed down but warped a little so that it would not lock. And in the corner three pairs of heavy, discarded boots, gathering dust. That was all.
And he was happy; naturally, sanely, unaffectedly happy. There was no room for doubt about that. “Honesty,” Mr. Ewing called it. He used that word over and over again in relation to Corey’s psychology at that time. “And there wasn’t,” he said, “a hypocritical bone in Jim Corey’s body.” One could see what he meant, and see, too, that it had, in his mind, some obscure bearing on what came after.
He waited a little here before he went on, as if he were going over to himself incidents too trivial to relate, but which would not separate themselves from his memory of Corey in those days.
“Well,” he began, abruptly, rousing himself from his secret contemplation, “there was that winter, nineteen-thirteen, and the next summer, nineteen-fourteen; and then the European war began.”
“And he went!” I supplemented, involuntarily, since from the trend of the narrative I had, of course, seen that coming.
“No,” said Mr. Ewing in a surprisingly quiet tone of contradiction. “No, he didn’t. I was like you. I thought he’d go.”
“You thought he would!” I exclaimed, for it seemed to me he had just been trying to make me see how unshakably he had believed Corey to be fixed in Dubuque.
“Certainly,” he said. “You’d think it would be only natural he’d want to go. Wouldn’t you?” he asked, as if he had detected in my expression some disposition not to agree.