“Why not?”

“Well, in our country we don’t take boys of nineteen very seriously,” said Polly, a little upset. “Did you fight much?”

“A good deal. I suppose then that young men of nineteen do not fall in love either in your country?”

“Oh, yes, they do, but nobody pays much attention to them. We call it puppy love.”

“Puppy love!” Juan frowned. “You are a strange people—you Americans.”

“Yes, I suppose we are but we like ourselves that way. Do you think that engine of yours is all right? It sounds queer to me.”

Pachuca shrugged his shoulders.

“It gives me trouble sometimes. It needs what you call an overhauling, but it will take us to Athens.”

Polly, with an ear trained to engine sounds, wondered whether it would. She felt that the last straw 55 would be to be stranded in the middle of the night in a lonely spot with this good-looking young man, who, to make matters worse, had turned out to be twenty-five instead of nineteen. Again they sat in silence while the machine wrenched itself in and out of ruts and through arroyos.

55

She found herself wondering what his life had been? A colonel at nineteen! She remembered the boys she had known in our own army, boys she had fed and sewed for on their way to France. They, too, had seemed young, but she felt a great difference. This young man suggested things of which Polly knew little. She wondered whether it was imagination that made her fancy that he had played a part in life which does not usually fall to twenty-five, except in a country so disordered, so desperate as Mexico.

Some of her boy friends who had come back from France and Belgium had carried in their faces some such suggestion, but only a few. For the most part they had come back as they went over, those who had returned whole; husky, lively, youngish chaps—more restless, less satisfied with life at home, perhaps, but not older particularly.

“That’s why he seems odd to me,” she concluded. “He’s done and seen things that a fellow his age hasn’t any business to have done and seen—that is, the way we look at it at home. Oh dear, I wonder if we’re ever going to get there? I can’t keep still much longer and yet I hate to stir him up.”

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