did not begin to do her justice, and sighed a bit. He was very
dull, and even her companionship, he thought, would be pleasant
if only she would come down off her pedestal and be humanly
sociable.

When he wrote a story about a fellow being laid up in the same
house with a girl--a girl with big, blue-gray eyes and ripply
brown hair--he would have the girl treat the fellow at least
decently. She would read poetry to him and bring him flowers,
and do ever so many nice things that would make him hate to get
well. He decided that he would write just that kind of story;
he would idealize it, of course, and have the fellow in love
with the girl; you have to, in stories. In real life it doesn't
necessarily follow that, because a fellow admires a girl's hair
and eyes, and wants to be on friendly terms, he is in love with
her. For example, he emphatically was not in love with Mona
Stevens. He only wanted her to be decently civil and to stop
holding a foolish grudge against him for not standing up and
letting himself be shot full of holes because she commanded it.

In the afternoons, Mrs. Stevens would sit beside him and knit
things and talk to him in a pleasantly garrulous fashion, and he
would lie and listen to her--and to Mona, singing somewhere.
Mona sang very well, he thought; he wondered if she had ever had
any training. Also, he wished he dared ask her not to sing that
song about "She's only a bird in a gilded cage." It brought back
too vividly the nights when he and Bob stood guard under the
quiet stars.

And then one day he hobbled out into the dining-room and ate