"I should hope not!" Blackford exclaimed. "You still haven't said whether you'll have dinner with me, though."

"I'd like to," Flora said. "Can we wait till after six, though? I've got a shirtwaist manufacturer coming in to see me at five, and I aim to give him a piece of my mind."

"Six-thirty, say, would be fine. Shall I come to your office?"

"All right." Flora smiled. "I'm looking forward to it." She hung up the telephone and went to work feeling better about the world than she had in some time.

Reginald Bartlett was discovering that he did not fit into the Richmond of late 1917 nearly so well as he had in 1914. Fighting on the Roanoke Valley front and in Sequoyah, getting captured twice and shot once (shot twice, too, actually: in the leg and the shoulder from the same machine-gun burst) by the Yankees, had left him a different man from the jaunty young fellow who'd gaily gone off to war.

Richmond was different, too. Then it had been bursting with July exuberance and confidence; now the chilly winds of October sliding into November fit the city's mood only too well. Defeat and autumn went together.

"Going to rain tomorrow, I reckon," Reggie said to Bill Foster as the two druggist's assistants walked along Seventh Street together. He reached up with his right hand to touch his left shoulder. "Says so right here."

Foster nodded, which set his jowls wobbling. He was short and round and dark, where Bartlett was above average height, on the skinny side (and skinnier after his wound), and blond. He said, "I heard enough people say that in the trenches, and they were right a lot of the time." He'd spent his war in Kentucky and Tennessee, and come home without a scratch.

After touching his shoulder again, Reggie said, "This isn't so much of a much." He'd had a different opinion while the wound stayed hot and full of pus, but he'd been a long way from objective. "Fellow I worked for before the war, man name of Milo Axelrod, he stopped a bullet with his face up in Maryland. He wasn't a bad boss-better than this McNally I'm working for now, anyhow."