Late in October you could window-write, and now, before November was through, Valdosta, New York, was white--tun-too-the-window white, take-a-deep-breath white, throw-your-books-in-the-hall-and-get-out-in-it white. But even so, when the school bell rang at three o'clock these afternoons the passionate few--all girls--stayed behind to hear adorable Miss Galtzer read another chapter of Wuthering Heights. So Babe sat on the sled, waiting. It was nearly three-thirty. C'mon out, Mattie, he thought. I don't have much time.

Abruptly, the big exit door swung open and about twelve or fourteen little girls pushed and shoved their way into the open air, chattering, yelling. Babe thought they hardly looked like an intellectual bunch. Maybe they didn't like Wuthering Heights. Maybe they were just bucking for rank, polishing apples. Not Mattie though. I'll bet she's nuts about it, Babe thought. I'll bet she wants Cathy to marry Heathcliff instead of Linton.

Then he saw Mattie, and she saw him at the same instant. When she saw him, her face lit up like nothing he ever saw before, and it was worth fifty wars. She ran over to him crazily in the knee-deep, virgin snow.

"Babe!" she said. "Gee!"

"Hiya, Mat. Hiya, kid," Babe said low and easy. "I thought maybe you'd like to go for a ride."

"Gee!"

"How was the book?" Babe asked.

"Good! Did you read it?"

"Yep."

"I want Cathy to marry Heathcliff. Not that other droop, Linton. He gives me a royal pain," Mattie said. "Gee! I didn't know you were coming! Did mamma tell you what time I got out?"

"Yes. Get on the sled and I'll give ya a ride."

"No. I'll walk with you."

Babe bent down and picked up the drag rope of the sled; then he walked through the snow toward the street, with Mattie beside him. The other kids, the rest of the Wuthering Heights crowd, stared. Babe thought, This is for me. I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. This is better than my books, this is better than Frances, this is better and bigger than myself. All right. Shoot me, all you sneaking Jap snipers that I've seen in the newsreels. Who cares?

They were in the street now. Babe took up the slack of the drag rope, attached it out of the way and straddled his sled.

"I'll get on first," he said. He got into position. "Okay. Get on my back, Mat."

"Not down Spring Street," Mattie said nervously. "Not down Spring Street, Babe." If you went down spring Street you coasted right into Locust, and Locust was all full of cars and trucks.

Only the big, tough, dirty-words boys coasted down Spring. Bobby Earhardt was killed doing it last year, and his father picked him up and Mrs. Earhardt was crying and everything.

Babe aimed the nose of the sled down Spring and got ready. "Get on my back," he instructed Mattie again.

"Not down Spring. I can't go down Spring, Babe. How 'bout Randolph Avenue? Randolph is swell!"

"It's all right. I wouldn't kid you, Mattie. It's all right with me."

Mattie suddenly got on his back, pushing her books under her stomach.

"Ready?" said Babe.

She couldn't answer him.

"You're shaking," Babe said, finally aware.

"No."

"Yes! You're shaking. You don't have to go, Mattie."

"No, I'm not. Honest."

"Yes," said Babe. "You are. You can get up. It's all right. Get up, Mat."

"I'm okay!" Mattie said. "Honest I am, Babe. Honest! Look!"

"No. Get up, honey."

Mattie got up.

Babe stood up, too, and banged the snow free from the runners of the sled.

"I'll go down Spring with you, Babe. Honest. I'll go down Spring with you," Mattie said anxiously.

"I know that," said her brother. "I know that." I'm happier than I ever was, he thought. "C'mon," he said. "Randolph is just as good. Better." He took her hand.

When Babe and Mattie got home, the door was opened for them by Corp. Vincent Caulfield in uniform. He was a pale young man with large ears and a blanched scar on his neck from a boyhood operation. He had a wonderful smile which he used infrequently. "How do you do," he said, dead-pan, opening the door. "If you've come to read the gas meter, you two, you've come to the wrong house. We don't use gas. We burn the children for heat. Always have. Good day."

He started to close the door. Babe put his foot in the doorway, which his guest proceeded to kick violently.

"Ow! I thought you were coming on the six o'clock!"

Vincent opened the door. "Come in," he said. "There's a woman here who'll give you both a piece of leaden cake."

"Old Vincent!" Babe said, shaking his hand.

"Who's this?" asked Vincent, looking at Mattie, who looked slightly frightened. "It's Matilda," he answered himself. "Matilda, there's no use in our waiting to get married. I've loved you ever since that night in Monte Carlo when you put your last diaper on Double-O. This was can't last----"

"Mattie," Babe said, grinning, "this is Vincent Caulfield."

"Hiya," said Mattie, with her mouth open.

Mrs. Gladwaller stood bewildered by the fireplace.

"I have a sister just your age," Vincent told Mattie. "She's not the beauty that you are, but she's probably far brighter."

"What's her grades?" Mattie demanded.

"Thirty in arithmetic, twenty in spelling, fifteen in history and zero in geography. She can't seem to bring her geography grades up with the others," Vincent said.

Babe was very happy, listening to Vincent with Mattie. He'd known that Vincent would be nice with her.

"Those are terrible grades," Mattie said, giggling.

"All right, you're so smart," said Vincent. "If A has three apples, and B leaves at three o'clock, how long will it take C to row five thousand miles upstream, bounded on the north by Chile? . . . Don't tell her, sergeant. the child must learn to do things by herself."

"C'mon upstairs," Babe said, slapping him on the back. "Hiya, mom! He said your cake was leaden."

"He ate two pieces."

"Where're your bags?" Babe asked his guest.

"Upstairs, the pretties," said Vincent, Following Babe up the stairs.

"I understand you're a writer, Vincent!" Mrs. Gladwaller called before they had reached the top.

Vincent leaned over the banister. "No, no. I'm an opera singer, Mrs. Gladwaller. I've brought all my music with me, you'll be glad to hear."

"Are you the guy that's in I Am Lydia Moore?" Mattie asked him.

"I am Lydia Moore. I've shaved off my mustache."

"How was New York, Vince?" Babe wanted to know, when they were relaxed in his room and smoking.

"Why are you in civilian clothes, sergeant?"

"Been indulging in athletics. I went sledding with Mattie. Not kidding. How was New York?"

"No more horsecars. They've taken the horsecars off the streets since I enlisted." Vincent picked up a book from the floor and examined the cover. "Books," he said contemptuously. "I used to read 'em all. Standish, Alger, Nick Carter. Book learning never did me no good. Remember that, young feller."

"I will. For the last time, how was Yew York?"

"No good, sergeant. My brother Holden is missing. The letter came while I was home."

"No, Vincent!" Babe said, taking his feet off the desk.

"Yes," said Vincent. He pretended to look through the pages of the book in his hand. "I used to bump into him at the old Joe College Club on Eighteenth and Third in New York. A beer joint for college kids and prep-school kids. I'd go there just looking for him, Christmas and Easter vacations when he was home. I'd drag my date through the joint, looking for him, and I'd find him way in the back. The noisiest, tightest kid in the place. He'd be drinking Scotch and every other kid in the place would be sticking to beer. I'd say to him, 'Are you okay, you moron? Do you wanna go home? Do you need any dough?' And he'd say, 'Naaa. Not me. Not me, Vince. Hiya boy. Hiya. Who's the babe' And I'd leave him there, but I'd worry about him because I remembered all the crazy, lost summertimes when the nut used to leave his trunks in a wet lump at the foot of the staircase instead of putting them on the line. I used to pick them up because he was me all over again." Vincent closed the book he was pretending to look through. With a circuslike flourish he took a nail file from his blouse pocket and started filing his nails. "Does your father send his guests away from the table if their nails aren't tidy?"

"Yes."

"What does he teach? You told me, but I forgot."

"Biology. . . . How old was he, Vincent?"

"Twenty," Vincent said.

"Nine years younger than you," Babe calculated inanely. "Do your folks--I mean do your folks know you're going overseas next week?"

"No," said Vincent." Yours?"

"No. I guess I'll have to tell them before the train leaves in the morning. I don't know how to tell mother. Her eyes fill up if somebody even mentions the word 'gun.'"

"Have you had fun, Babe?" Vincent asked seriously.

"Yes, a lot," Babe answered. . . . "The cigarettes are behind you."

Vincent reached for them. "Seen a lot of Frances?" he asked.

"Yes. She's wonderful, Vince. The folks don't like her, but she's wonderful for me."

"Maybe you should have married her," Vincent said. Then, sharply, "He wasn't even twenty, Babe. Not till next month. I want to kill so badly I can't sit still. Isn't that funny? I'm notoriously yellow. All my life I've even avoided fist fights, always getting out of them by talking fast. Now I want to shoot it out with people. What do you think of that?"

Babe said nothing for a minute. Then, "Did you have a good time--I mean till that letter came?"

"No. I haven't had a good time since I was twenty-five. I should have got married when I was twenty-five. I'm too old to make conversation at bars or neck in taxicabs with new girls."

"Did you see Helen at all?" Babe asked.

"No. I understand she and the gentleman she married are going to have a little stranger."

"Nice," said Babe dryly.

Vincent smiled. "It's good to see you, Babe. Thanks for asking me. G.I.'s--especially G.I.'s who are friends--belong together these days. It's no good being with civilians any more. They don't know what we know and we're no longer used to what they know. It doesn't work out so hot."

Babe nodded and thoughtfully took a drag from his cigarette.

"I never really knew anything about friendship before I was in the Army. Did you, Vince?"

"Not a thing. It's the best thing there is. Just about."

Mrs. Gladwaller's voice shrilled up the stairs and into the room, "Babe! Your father's home! Dinner!"

The two soldiers stood up.

When the meal was over, Professor Gladwaller held forth at the dinner table. He had been in the "last one" and he was acquainting Vincent with some of the trials the men in the "last one" had undergone. Vincent, the son of an actor, listened with the competent expression of a good player on-stage with the star. Babe sat back in his seat, staring at the glow of his cigarette, occasionally lifting his cup of coffee. Mrs. Gladwaller watched Babe, not listening to her husband, searching out her son's face, remembering it when it was round and pink, remembering the summer when it had started to get long and dark and intense. It was the best face, she thought. It wasn't handsome like his father's, but it was the best face in the family. Mattie was under the table, untying Vincent's shoes. He was holding his feet still, letting her, pretending not to notice.

"Cockroaches," said Professor Gladwaller impressively. "Everywhere you looked, cockroaches."

"Please, Jack," said Mrs. Gladwaller absently. "At the table."

"Everywhere you looked," her husband repeated. "Couldn't get rid of 'em."

"They must have been a nuisance," Vincent said.

Annoyed that Vincent had to make a series of perfunctory remarks to humor his father, Babe suddenly said, "Daddy, I don't mean to sound pontifical, but sometimes you talk about the last war--all you fellas do--as though it had been some kind of rugged, sordid game by which society of your day weeded out the men from the boys. I don't mean to be tiresome, but you men from the last was, you all agree that war is hell, but--I don't know--you all seem to think yourselves a little superior for having been participants in it. It seems to me that men in Germany who were in the last one probably talked the same way, or thought the same way, and when Hitler provoked this one, the younger generation in Germany were ready to prove themselves as good or better than their fathers." babe paused, self-consciously. "I believe in this war. If I didn't, I would have gone to a conscientious objectors' camp and swung an ax for the duration. I believe in killing Nazis and Fascists and Japs, because there's no other way that I know of. But I believe, as I've never believed in anything else before, that it's the moral duty of all the men who have fought and will fight in this war to keep our mouths shut, once it's over, never again to mention it in any way. It's time we let the dead die in vain. It's never worked to the other way, God knows." Babe clenched his left hand under the table. "But if we come back, if German men come back, if British men come back, and Japs, and French, and all the other men, all of us talking, writing, painting, making movies of heroism and cockroaches and foxholes and blood, then future generations will always be doomed to future Hitlers. It's never occurred to boys to have contempt for wars, to point to soldiers' pictures in history books, laughing at them. If German boys had learned to be contemptuous of violence, Hitler would have had to take up knitting to keep his ego warm."