During the long fair days while we waited for Major Murphy to take
us to the front, we wandered about Paris, puffing and spluttering
through the French language. Henry never was sure of anything
but toot sweet and some devilish perversion was forever sticking
sophomore German into my mouth, when French should have risen. The
German never actually broke out. If it had, we should have been shot
as spies. But it was so close that it always seemed to be snooping
around ready to jump out. That made it hard for me to shine in
French.

These adventures with the French language were not exactly the
martial adventures that Charley Chandler, of Wichita, and Warren
Finney, of Emporia, thought we would be having at the Front, when
they trundled us out to win the war. Yet these adventures were
serious. They were adventures in lonesomeness. We could imagine
how the American soldier boy would feel and what he would say when
this language began to wash about his ears and submerge him in
its depths. We could fancy American soldiers wandering through
the French villages, unable to buy things, because they couldn't
understand the prices. We could understand the dreary, bleak,
isolated lives of these American boys, with all the desolation of
foreigners hungering always for human companionship, outside of the
everlasting camp. And we came to know the misery of homesickness
that hides in the phrase, "a stranger in a strange land!"

So we were glad to summon the Eager Soul to dine with us, and we
let her order a dinner so complicated that it tasted like a lexicon!
We learned much about the Eager Soul that night. She told us of
her two college degrees, her year's teaching experience, her four