Mary Heaton Vorse

“ Ricky was as dead as Richard's mother. The news of her death had come to him two years before, not with the clean, deep stab of grief, but as something still farther shutting him off from the life's reality, a window gone through which to look on the world, a thickening of the darkness around him. ”

“ It appeared to him like a great shining globe spinning about, and it had a hard, transparent surface, and within this surface were all those people who were part of life, all those people who had their place in life's complex affairs; while on the outside, swarming over the hard, shining surface, unable to get in, were the boys whom war had disinherited, the maimed ones and those who were sick. ”

“ You could see it in the way that the girls talked to the men and the men joked them back, and the casual acquaintances they formed in the twilights. Evidently it was the custom. The girls came flooding out from the munitions up the Strand, up Charing Cross, up Piccadilly, out for a good time.
What an England! With what insolence of youth they enjoyed themselves, as though they said to the venerable stones of the city:
"Others like us helped to build you, and we have defended you, We have come from the ends of the earth to do it. ”

“ There was a great company of them, young and old-men whose place in the world had been wiped out while they fought, men who came home to find their families had become strangers. There were blind men and the mutilated, and there was this army of boys like the one with whom he had talked, to whom war had given no trade, and there were boys whose only knowledge of life was a box-stall. ”

“ There was not in all the world a person who needed him or who could even possibly need him. Service—all the rest of England knew it, those rioting girls and boys in uniform, his contemporaries now marching down the streets the victorious owners of England. And Ricky, who had only the cold walls of his lonely pride—and no memory of any service ever—turned his face resolutely away from this world in which he had no part or parcel. ”

“ He knew he had no business to stare in this glassy, fixed sort of a way at old Hummer. Why old Hummer was the most familiar thing in the world. He could not remember when she had not been their housekeeper. Her sitting-room had always been his refuge from wrath. Yet this big, kindly woman seemed as improbable and as far removed from usual experience as finding a kindly cow gazing at one from one's bedroom door—cows and women being equally absent from German prison camps. ”

“ Ricky wondered to himself. Perhaps this boy roamed London streets unable to speak to people or to take part in the great festival which was forever there in progress. "When you got away, what would you do?" Ricky asked.
"I don't rightly know. The older men—it's easy for them—but when you haven't a trade—" He spoke with difficulty. "What are you doing with yourself, now that you're through?" he asked.
"I've been in prison four years," Ricky blurted out. ”

“ He had to tell her his discovery. He had to ask her for this clue to life which it seemed to him she held in her hand, and he felt he couldn't wait, and that life somehow would have failed him again if she were not home. ”

“ They swanked past him—groups of Scotchmen, swinging their skirts above their bare knees; Americans, solid, and walking with direction; now a New Zealand boy, searching in the crowd for a girl to speak to. Suddenly three young girls going abreast barred Ricky's way, laughing. ”

“ Everything about them—the way they undress and the noises they make and the way they clean their teeth—that you plan how you could kill them, and the only reason you don't kill them is that you'd get caught, and you know that they're planning all the time how they'd like to kill you. ”