doubtless why we had the privilege of his society. After all, it is
highly improbable that this poor socialist suffered more at the hands of
the great and good French government than did many a Conscientious
Objector at the hands of the great and good American government;
or--since all great governments are _per se_ good and vice versa--than
did many a man in general who was cursed with a talent for thinking
during the warlike moments recently passed; during, that is to say, an
epoch when the g. and g. nations demanded of their respective peoples the
exact antithesis to thinking; said antitheses being vulgarly called
Belief. Lest which statement prejudice some members of the American
Legion in disfavour of the Machine-Fixer or rather of myself--awful
thought--I hasten to assure everyone that the Machine-Fixer was a highly
moral person. His morality was at times almost gruesome; as when he got
started on the inhabitants of the women's quarters. Be it understood that
the Machine-Fixer was human, that he would take a letter--provided he
liked the sender--and deliver it to the sender's _adoree_ without a
murmur. That was simply a good deed done for a friend; it did not imply
that he approved of the friend's choice, which for strictly moral reasons
he invariably and to the friend's very face violently deprecated. To this
little man of perhaps forty-five, with a devoted wife waiting for him in
Belgium (a wife whom he worshipped and loved more than he worshipped and
loved anything in the world, a wife whose fidelity to her husband and
whose trust and confidence in him echoed in the letters which--when we
three were alone--the little Machine-Fixer tried always to read to us,
never getting beyond the first sentence or two before he broke down and
sobbed from his feet to his eyes), to such a little person his reaction
to _les femmes_ was more than natural. It was in fact inevitable.

Women, to him at least, were of two kinds and two kinds only. There were
_les femmes honnetes_ and there were _les putains_. In La Ferte, he