"Whatter yer mean—broken?" says Jim, sort of dazed. "Just that!" I snapped. "Here you get tight and take a insult from a German; and, as if that wasn't enough, you go farther and get bit by a pro-German alligator! And you don't even offer to fight the German who owns the alligator, either! And, what's furthermore, you've got your face swoll up so's you won't be able to dance to-morrow night; and[Pg 25] that iodine won't wash off; and the act is crabbed in the bud—do you get me? Crabbed! And I'm through—that's all! So don't never come near me again!" [Pg 25] Believe you me, Jim tried to make me listen to reason; but I couldn't hear no reason to listen to, and so wouldn't let him say much. Then Jim got mad and bawled me out for breaking my rule and going on the party, and by the time we got to my place we wasn't speaking at all—not even good night or good-by forever! II For hours and hours after Ma got me to bed I just lay there thinking and aching and feeling all hot and ashamed and terribly lonesome, and with my career all ruined because of the Germans—to say nothing of having been obliged to become disengaged to Jim. For And then, just as I was nearly crazy wondering how I was to get my self-respect back, I got a swell idea. I would enlist! Ladies could. I remembered reading a piece in a newspaper some place about yeowomen or something. And as soon as I realized that I could serve Uncle Sam and help get even with[Pg 26] that bird, Von Hoffman, and the Kaiser and the alligator, and lose my personal feelings in public service, I got the most wonderfully easy feeling round my heart and dropped right off to sleep. But when I woke up in the morning it was something fierce, the way I felt. Believe you me, it was just like I had ate Welsh rabbit the night before, or something—the weight that was on my chest. At first I couldn't make out just what it was. Then I remembered. I had lost Jim! Of course I hadn't lost him so much as shook him; but it was all the same, or looked that way in the cold gray dawn of ten A. M. [Pg 26] Honest to Gawd, I never knew how fond I was of Jim until I woke up that day and realized he was gone forever! But I wouldn't of phoned him and say I'd changed my mind—not on a bet I wouldn't. And, anyways, I hadn't changed my mind. The evidences begun to pile up against him. I commenced to remember how he had been away on some mysterious
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