ning patriotic young women of excellent families and first-rate personal qualifications danced with the officers, for their country. He told me that he had two grand ambitions: the first was to fire his gun in France; the second was to come home, remove his puttees, and get into a pair of silk socks again. He has realized the second; and for the first, though he never got overseas, he is probably still receiving substantial credit this summer among the fair friends with whom he is yachting off the Maine coast."
"Well," I inquired, "why shouldn't he? What do you want to do to Jack—make him miserable?"
"Not wholly," Thorpe retorted, "but I should like to send to him—and to his father—for summer reading in the hammock, a copy of Georges Duhamel's Civilization, 1914-1917. It would stir up an organ in him that the war hasn't touched yet—his imagination. Have you seen the book? Goncourt Prize last year. Disquieting, but really worth reading. One of the notable impressions from the front. It hasn't the picturesque energy or sullen intensity of Barbusse. It isn't a merely excruciating picture of mental and physical horror, like Latzko's Men in War. And it quite lacks the splendor of baffled fighting heroism that distinguishes
