The young man shook his head and displayed the name on the cover.
"Anatole France. I used to be crazy about him, but now he seems
rather a back number." Then he glanced towards the just-vacated
chair. "Australian," he said.

"How d'you know?"

"Can't mistake them. There's nothing else so lean and fine produced
on the globe to-day. I was next door to them at Pozieres and saw
them fight. Lord! Such men! Now and then you had a freak, but
most looked like Phoebus Apollo."

Dickson gazed with a new respect at his neighbour, for he had not
associated him with battle-fields. During the war he had been a
fervent patriot, but, though he had never heard a shot himself,
so many of his friends' sons and nephews, not to mention cousins of
his own, had seen service, that he had come to regard the experience
as commonplace. Lions in Africa and bandits in Mexico seemed to him
novel and romantic things, but not trenches and airplanes which were
the whole world's property. But he could scarcely fit his neighbour
into even his haziest picture of war. The young man was tall and a
little round-shouldered; he had short-sighted, rather prominent
brown eyes, untidy black hair and dark eyebrows which came near
to meeting. He wore a knickerbocker suit of bluish-grey tweed,
a pale blue shirt, a pale blue collar, and a dark blue tie--a
symphony of colour which seemed too elaborately considered to be
quite natural. Dickson had set him down as an artist or a newspaper
correspondent, objects to him of lively interest. But now the
classification must be reconsidered.