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arrogantly.
    “You will have to find a way of conducting yourself more circumspectly.”
    “Yes, sir. Oh, Daddy! I’m so tired of just sitting on the porch and having dates and watching things rot.”
    “It seems to me you have plenty to do without corrupting others.”
    “Nothing to do but drink and make love,” she commented privately.
    She had a strong sense of her own insignificance; of her life’s slipping by while June bugs covered the moist fruit in the fig trees with the motionless activity of clustering flies upon an open sore. The bareness of the dry Bermuda grass about the pecan trees crawled imperceptibly with tawny caterpillars. The matlike vines dried in the autumn heat and hung like empty locust shells from the burned thickets about the pillars of the house. The sun sagged yellow over the grass plots and bruised itself on the clotted cotton fields. The fertile countryside that grew things in other seasons spread flat from the roads and lay prone in ribbed fans of broken discouragement. Birds sang dissonantly. Not a mule in the fields nor a human being on the sandy roads could have borne the heat between the concave clay banks and the mediant cypress swamps that divided the camp from the town—privates died of sunstroke.
    The evening sun buttoned the pink folds of the sky and followed a busload of officers into town, young lieutenants, old lieutenants, free from camp for the evening to seek what explanation of the world war this little Alabama town had to offer. Alabama knew them all with varying degrees of sentimentality.
    “Is your wife in town, Captain Farreleigh?” asked a voice in the joggling vehicle. “You seem very high tonight.”
    “She’s here—but I’m on my way to see my girl. That’s why I’m happy,” the captain said shortly, whistling to himself.
    “Oh.” The especially young lieutenant didn’t know what to say to the captain. It would be about like offering congratulations for a stillborn child he supposed to say to the man, “Isn’t that splendid” or “How nice!” He might say, “Well, Captain, that’ll be very scandalous indeed!”—if he wanted to be court-martialed.
    “Well, good luck, I’m going to see mine tomorrow,” he said finally, and further to show that he bore no moral prejudice, he added “good luck.”
    “Are you still panhandling in Beggs Street?” asked Farreleigh abruptly.
    “Yes,” the lieutenant laughed uncertainly.
    The car deposited them in the breathless square, the center of the town. In the vast space enclosed by the low buildings the vehicle seemed as minuscular as a coach in the palace yard of an old print. The arrival of the bus made no impression on the city’s primal sleep. The old rattletrap disgorged its cargo of clicking masculinity and vibrant official restraint into the lap of this invertebrate world.
    Captain Farreleigh crossed to the taxi stand.
    “Number five Beggs Street,” he said with loud insistence, making sure his words reached the lieutenant, “as fast as you can make it.”
    As the car swung off, Farreleigh listened contentedly to the officer’s forced laugh stabbing the night behind him.
    “Hello, Alabama!”
    “Ho, there, Felix!”
    “My name is not Felix.”
    “It suits you, though. What is your name?”
    “Captain Franklin McPherson Farreleigh.”
    “The war’s on my mind, I couldn’t remember.”
    “I’ve written a poem about you.”
    Alabama took the paper he gave her and held it to the light falling through the slats of the shutters like a staff of music.
    “It’s about West Point,” she said disappointed.
    “That’s the same thing,” said Farreleigh. “I feel the same way about you.”
    “Then the United States Military Academy appreciates the fact that you like its gray eyes. Did you leave the last verse in the taxi or were you keeping the car in case I should shoot?”
    “It’s waiting because I thought we could ride. We ought not to go to the club,” he said