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“No,” she said firmly, “I wouldn’t. Jimmy plays a good game of golf, but he’s no use at all on a horse—never was. And I think it would be nice enough—now—for him to have got across and have had a medal, like you, Stacey dear, so that I could say: ‘I don’t think you’ve met my husband, Mrs. Jones. You see, he’s been in France for two years. Oh, yes, D. S. C., of course!’—but at the time I never did want him to go, not for a minute.”

The two young men laughed again. Stacey considered his sister’s point of view human, straightforward and sensible. Where was the good, he wondered swiftly, in going through a lot of complicated emotions, since, if you were honest, you always ended in just such simplicity? It was a lot better to be simple in the first place and stay so.

But Mr. Carroll, who was in the midst of a swallow of claret, gulped suddenly, choked, and set his glass down with a bump. “That,” he said angrily, “is about as silly and weak and unpatriotic as anything I’ve ever heard even you say, Julie!”