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While the afternoon passed he remained at her side. Finally Ailie came over to me and whispered, with a laugh: “He’s following me around. He thinks I haven’t paid my carfare.”

She turned quickly. Miss Kitty Preston stood facing us.

“Ailie Calhoun, I didn’t think it of you to go out and deliberately try to take a man away from another girl. I thought you considered yourself above anything like that.”

Miss Preston’s voice was low, but it held that tensity that can be felt farther than it can be heard, and I saw Ailie’s clear lovely eyes glance about in panic. Luckily, Earl himself was ambling cheerfully and innocently toward us.

“If you care for him you certainly oughtn’t to belittle yourself in front of him,” said Ailie, her head high.

It was her acquaintance with the traditional way of behaving against Kitty Preston’s naïve and fierce possessiveness, or if you prefer it, Ailie’s “breeding” against the other’s “commonness.” She turned away.

“Wait a minute, kid!” cried Earl Schoen. “How about your address? Maybe I’d like to give you a ring on the phone.”

She looked at him in a way that should have indicated to Kitty her entire lack of interest.

“I’m very busy at the Red Cross this month,” she said, her voice as cool as her blond hair. “Good-by.”

On the way home she laughed. Her air of having been unintentionally involved in a contemptible business vanished.

“She’ll never hold that young man,” she said. “He wants somebody new.”

“Apparently he wants Ailie Calhoun.”

The idea amused her.

“He could give me his ticket punch to wear. What fun! If mother ever saw anybody like that come in the house, she’d just lie down and die.”

And to give Ailie credit, it was fully a fortnight before he did come in her house, although he rushed her until she pretended to be annoyed at the next country-club dance.

“He’s the biggest tough, Andy,” she whispered to me. “But he’s so sincere.”

Somehow Mrs. Calhoun didn’t die at his appearance on the threshold. The supposedly ineradicable prejudices of Ailie’s parents were a convenient phenomenon that disappeared at her wish. It was her friends who were astonished. Ailie, always a little above Tarleton, whose admirers had usually been the “nicest” men of the camp – Ailie and Lieutenant Schoen! I grew tired of assuring people that she was merely distracting herself – and indeed every week or so there was someone new – an ensign from Pensacola, an old friend from New Orleans – but always, in between times, there was Earl Schoen.

Orders arrived for an advance party of officers and sergeants to proceed to the port of embarkation and take ship to France. My name was on the list. I had been away for a week and when I got back to camp, Earl Schoen buttonholed me immediately.