Marvin lay in the hospital, trying to realize what had happened to him. Never again could he hope to stir a solution with one hand while he regulated a stopcock with the other. Nor could he see himself making bulbs of laboratory glass, no matter how tough it had been rendered by the nineteenth element.

But presently a cable arrived from his father:

The message gave him back his courage. He would not accept a cent. He would teach his right hand to do the work of two, and then apply to Grein for a job. He would do nothing for the rest of his life but study how to blow Berlin off the face of the earth. Nothing but subatomic lightning would teach the Germans anything. They had a natural monopoly of potash, they had mastered nitrogen, they had phosphates the secret of which they owed to a British chemist. Their next war with America would be over dye-stuffs.

But wait—he was forgetting Gratia. He was probably going to marry Gratia. He was not exactly in the mood to do so, but he must remember that she could hardly live on the salary of a laboratory assistant.

Who was this lovely creature, anyhow? He asked the nurse to bring him the letters from his trunk. There were twenty-four from Gratia, and he read them all.

They were written in a neat round hand, every i dotted. They were most friendly. They kept track of him. In the earlier ones there was much about the life at Eglantine. Several concerned boxes that she was sending for his men. She described in pretty detail the commencement of 1917, when she was class president. She described her return to Chicago, her bandage-making, the club for soldiers and sailors, the Waukegan club for the blue-jackets, and so forth and so on. But the letters of the current year were less interesting. She seemed to be running out of subjects. When he had been watching the enemy, she had been watching the sunsets from her father’s yacht. Up in the straits of St. Mary a very quiet farm-girl had given her some flowers. She did not seem to realize that he was not concerned with farm-girls.

He spent half an hour in tying those twenty-four letters up again. They were not so fascinating as the job of learning to use his teeth and hand. He let the nurse return the mass of expensive note-paper to his trunk, but would not let her take his mother’s letters. Over these he laid a protecting arm, and went to sleep holding them close to his side.

Next day he read those two hundred and was sorry they were so few. She wrote of the boyish delight exhibited by his father on receiving from Dr. Grein a copy of the article on lead. She sent him a solemn parody of the article composed by mother and daughter. She told how his enlistment had stirred his oldest brother, and how Augustus had camped in Washington till he succeeded in getting a job with the Red Cross. She recorded the profanity uttered by his brother Charles when his services at Washington were finally considered more valuable than his probable services in the field. She told of his sister Anita, who was teaching shut-ins to do things that nobody thought they ever could do, and getting them paid for it. Jimmy Hogg was often in for Sunday evening supper, but never had much to say, and wouldn’t make love to Anita, though plenty of others did. She thought Jimmy pure gold, but described him as understatement incarnate. She presumed that if he were addressed in a thunder storm to the effect that it was raining, he would say that on the whole he didn’t imagine that he was prepared to deny it. In short, as Marvin read and read, he laughed and cried, and was very homesick for his mother.

And then it came over him that he did not long for Gratia. She was sweet and sensible and beautiful, but he did not care two straws if he never saw her again. He had been an idiot to ask her to marry him. It would cost him a good deal to make that proposal again, as he certainly would do. To be the one-handed husband of so elegant a creature was a sorry prospect.

He could see how it all happened. Girls had rather flung themselves at him just because he had chestnut hair, and he had taken refuge in Gratia. Offering himself to Gratia was all mixed up with offering himself to the United States. If he did not grouch about losing a hand, he must not grouch about winning the girl.

Good-by to all thoughts of radiochemistry. He must get back into fuels and show manufacturers how to stoke. He must even be glad over Gratia, and in due time give her a child.