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Gretchen felt motherly and useful, making up in a small way for what these courteous, uncomplaining young men had suffered for their country. The lights were low in the wards and all the men were supposed to be in bed. Gretchen had made her usual special visit to the bedside of a soldier named Talbot Hughes, who had been wounded in the throat and couldn’t speak. He was the youngest soldier in the ward and the most pitiful and Gretchen liked to believe that the touch of her hand and her goodnight smile made the long hours before dawn more bearable
    for the boy. She was tidying the common-room, where the men read and wrote letters, played cards and checkers, and listened to the phonograph. She stacked the magazines neatly on the centre table, cleared off a chessboard and put the pieces in their box, dropped two empty Coca-Cola bottles into a wastebasket.
    She liked the little housewifely end of the night, conscious of the hundreds of young men sleeping around this central, warm core of the hospital block, young men saved from death, acquitted of war, young men healing and forgetting fear and agony, young men one day nearer to peace and home.
    She had lived in small, cramped quarters all her life and the spaciousness of the common-room, with its pleasant light-green walls and deep upholstered chairs, made her feel almost like a hostess in her own elegant home, after a successful party. She was humming as she finished her work and was just about to turn out the light and start for the locker-room to change her clothes when a tall young Negro in pyjamas and the Medical Corps’ maroon bathrobe limped in.
    “Evening, Miss Jordache,’ the Negro said. His name was Arnold. He had been in the hospital a long time and she knew him fairly well. There were only two Negroes in the block and this was the first time Gretchen had seen one without the other. She always made a particular point of being agreeable to them. Arnold had had his leg smashed when a shell hit the truck be was driving in France. He came from St Louis, he had told her, and had eleven brothers and sisters, and had finished high school.
    He had spent many hours reading and wore glasses while doing so. Although he seemed to read at random, comic books, magazines, the plays of Shakespeare, anything that happened to be lying around, Gfetchen had decided that he was ripe for literature. He did look bookish, like a brilliant, lonely student from an African country, with his Army-issue glasses. From time to time Gretchen brought him books, either her own or her brother Rudolph’s, or sometimes from the public library in town. Arnold read them promptly and returned them conscientiously, in good condition without ever offering any comment on them, Gretchen felt that he was silent out of embarrassment, not wanting to pretend to be an intellectual in front of the other men. She read a great deal herself, but omnivorously, her taste guided in the last two years by Mr Polack’s catholic enthusiasms. So she had through the months offered Arnold such disparate works as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and the poems
    of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Rupert Brooke, and This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
    She smiled as the boy came into the room. ‘Good evening, Arnold,’ she said. ‘Looking for something?’
    ‘Naw. Just wanderin’. Couldn’t get to sleep, somehow. Then I saw the light in here and I say to myself, “I’ll go in and visit with that pretty lil Miss Jordache, pass the time of day.”’ He smiled at her, his teeth white and perfect: Unlike the other men, who called her Gretchen, he always used her last name. His speech was somehow countrified, as though his family had carried the burden of their Alabama farm with them when they migrated north. He was quite black, gaunt in the loose bathrobe. It had taken two or three operations to save his leg, Gretchen knew, and she was sure she could see the lines of suffering around his mouth.
    ‘I was just going to put