Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/171

stopped, and we stopped. Close enough that we could look up high and see the soldiers' faces. Thousands of soldiers. I'll never forget them. Waving and cheering and jammed in rows a dozen deep all up and down the decks. I tried to find Paul. I couldn't, but it didn't matter—I was so sure he was there, somewhere. I smiled and smiled, and threw kisses. And all the time, I was smiling at the rail they had pushed him off of two days before, wrapped in a flag—and I didn't know——"

She broke off, fighting to retain the self-control that had kept her voice low and even . . . with an evenness that had somehow testified more poignantly than screams to the depth and truth of her emotion, Her dry-bright eyes looked out over the sea, and she shivered almost imperceptibly. Jock sat motionless, wracked. "God—how you did hurt her—" He would have taken her in his arms to soothe her, but something forbade him. It was as though she hid from him now, behind the ghost of the man she had so loved.

Presently he sensed a change in her, a definite hardening . . . steel doors pushed shut with a clang . . . and she was again the Yvonne he knew best, cool and possessed and faintly satirical. "Light me a cigarette, Jock. Appropriate to the rest of this autobiography.

"I won't try to tell you about those next few weeks. I couldn't tell you if I wanted to, because I can't remember anything about them except a sort of dazed, bruised agony. Just two things I knew: that there wasn't any God, and that it didn't matter in the least what happened to me, any more.

"I didn't go back to Ohio. I don't think it even occurred to me that to go back would be the logical thing, and I've never been back since, to this day. I went to New York . . . did you ever notice how