“It’s so, Rupert,” said Doe, in a corner of the Officers’ ante-room one night before dinner, “I’m an Epicurean.  Surely the Body doesn’t prompt to pleasure only to be throttled?  There’s something in what they were saying at Mess yesterday that these things are normal and natural.  I mean, human nature is human nature, and you can’t alter it.  I don’t think any man is, or can be, what they call ‘pure.’  I s’pose every man has done these things, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t,” I answered, conscious of hot cheeks. “We may do them, but there are people I can’t imagine it of.”

“But, again, there’s the question whether War doesn’t mean the suspension of all ordinary moral laws.  The law that you shan’t kill is in abeyance.  The instinct of self-preservation has to be suppressed.  There’s some justification for being an Epicurean for the duration of the war.”

“Perhaps so,” acknowledged I.  “I don’t know.”

As we left the ante-room and sat down to Mess, Doe announced: 

“I’ve every intention of getting tight to-night.”

“Pourquoi pas?” said I. “C’est la guerre!”

“Before I die,” continued Doe, who was already flushed with gin and vermouth, “I want to have lived.  I want to have touched all the joys and experiences of life.  Pass the Chablis.  Here’s to you, Rupert.  Cheerioh!”

“Cheerioh!” toasted I, raising my glass.  “Happy days!”

“I’m determined to be able to say, Rupert, whatever happens:  ’Never mind, I had a good time while it lasted!’”

“I’m with you,” said I, who was now nearly as flushed as he.  “Let’s be in everything up to the neck.”

“Surely,” Doe endorsed. “C’est la guerre!”

So with the meat and sweets went the wines of France; with the nuts the sparkling “bubbly”; and in the ante-room Martinis, Benedictines, and Whisky-Macdonalds.  Soon the night became noisy, and Doe, encouraged by riotous subalterns, jumped on a table and declaimed a little thickly his prize Horatian Ode: 

“Bring out the mellow wine, the best,
The sweet, convivial wine, and test
Its four-year-old maturity;
To Jove commit the rest: 
Nor question his divine intents,
For, when he stays the battling elements
The wind shall brood o’er prostrate sea
And fail to move the ash’s crest
Or stir the stilly cypress trees. 
Be no forecaster of the dawn;
Deem it an asset, and be gay—­
Come, merge to-morrow’s misty morn
In the resplendence of to-day.”

And, after all this, it was an easy step, lightly taken, to the things of night.  We set out for the strange streets; and there, in the night air, the precocious young pedant, Edgar Doe, became, despite all the new theories, the shy, simple boy he really was.  We would both become shy—­shy of each other, and shy of the shameful doorway.

And then the misery of the morning, to be quickly forgotten in the joy of life!