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His discovery that his father and mother differed about the war was the first of other discoveries; that they differed about him; that they differed about many matters; that, indeed, they had no common ground at all on which to meet; between them, although Graham did not put it that way, was a No-Man's Land strewn with dead happiness, lost desires, and the wreckage of years of dissension.

It was incredible to Graham that he should ever reach the forties, but he wondered some times if all of life was either looking forward or looking back. And it seemed to him rather tragic that for Clayton, who still looked like a boy, there should be nothing but his day at the mill, his silent evening at home, or some stodgy dinner-party where the women were all middle-aged, and the other men a trifle corpulent.

For the first time he was beginning to think of Clayton as a man, rather than a father.

Not that all of this was coherently thought out. It was a series of impressions, outgrowth of his own beginning development and of his own uneasiness.

He wondered, too, about Rodney Page. He seemed to be always around, underfoot, suave, fastidious, bowing Natalie out of the room and in again. He had deplored the war until he found his attitude unfashionable, and then he began, with great enthusiasm, to arrange pageants for Red Cross funds, and even to make little speeches, graceful and artificial, patterned on his best after-dinner manner.

Graham was certain that he supported his mother in trying to keep him at home, and he began to hate him with a healthy young hate. However, late in April, he posed in one of the pageants, rather ungraciously, in a khaki uniform. It was not until the last minute that he knew that Delight Haverford was to be the nurse bending over his prostrate figure. He turned rather savage.

"Rotten nonsense," he said to her, "when they stood waiting to be posed.

"Oh, I don't know. They're rather pretty;"

"Pretty! Do you suppose I want it be pretty?"

"Well, I do," said Delight, calmly.

"It's fake. That's what I hate. If you were really a nurse, and was really in uniform -! But this parading in somebody else's clothes, or stuff hired for the occasion - it's sickening."

Delight regarded him with clear, appraising eyes.

"Why don't you get a uniform of your own, then?" she inquired. She smiled a little.

He never knew what the effort cost her. He was pale and angry, and his face in the tableau was so set that it brought a round of applause. With the ringing down of the curtain he confronted her, almost menacingly.

"What did you mean by that?" he demanded. "We've hardly got into this thing yet."

"We are in it, Graham."

"Just because I don't leap into the first recruiting office and beg them to take me - what right have you got to call me a slacker?"

"But I heard - "

"Go on!"

"It doesn't matter what I heard, if you are going."

"Of course I'm going," he said, truculently.

He meant it, too. He would get Anna settled somewhere - she had begun to mend - and then he would have it out with Marion and his mother. But there was no hurry. The war would last a long time. And so it was that Graham Spencer joined the long line of those others who had bought a piece of ground, or five yoke of oxen, or had married a wife.

It was the morning after the pageant that Clayton, going down-town with him in the car, voiced his expectation that the government would take over their foreign contracts, and his feeling that, in that case, it would be a mistake to profit by the nation's necessities.

"What do you mean, sir?"

"I mean we should take only a small profit. A banker's profit."

Graham had been fairly stunned, and had sat quiet while Clayton explained his attitude. There were times when big profits were allowable. There was always the risk to invested capital to consider. But he did not want to grow fat on the nation's misfortunes. Italy was one thing. This was different.

"But - we are just getting on our feet!"

"Think it over!" said Clayton.