The new tale was different; less vehement, less emotional, above all less personal. Was he already arriving at an attitude of detachment from his subject? If so, Halo knew, Frenside would see a future novelist in him. "If he goes on retailing the successive chapters of his own history, as they happen to him, they'll be raw autobiography, or essays disguised as novels; but not real novels. And he probably won't be able to keep it up long." That would be what Frenside would say in such a case. It was his unalterable conviction that the "me-book," as he called it, however brilliant, was at best sporadic, with little reproductive power. Well, the charge of subjectivity could hardly be brought against the tale she had just read. Boy as he was, the writer had moved far enough away from his subject to see several sides of it. And it was an odd story to have interested a beginner. It was called "Unclaimed," and related an episode brought about by the sending home of the bodies of American soldiers fallen in France. Myra Larcom, the beauty of her prairie village, had become engaged in 1917 to Ben Purchase, a schoolmate and neighbour. Ben Purchase was killed at the front, and Myra became the heroine as well as the beauty of Green Lick, which happened to have no other fallen son to mourn. When the government offered to restore its dead soldiers to their families for burial, Myra of course accepted. Her Ben was an orphan, with no relations near enough to assume the expense of his translation; and besides, she said, she would never have allowed anyone else to have the privilege… . But the dead heroes were slow in returning. Months passed, and before there was any news of the warrior's approach, another hero—and alive—had come back and won her. It appeared that her engagement to Ben Purchase had been a last-minute affair, the result of a moonlight embrace the night he started; indeed, she was no longer very sure that there had been an actual engagement; and when at length his body reached New York there was no one to claim it; and no one to pay for its transport, much less for the funeral and gravestone. But Tullia Larcom, Myra's elder sister, had always been secretly in love with Ben, though he had never given her a glance. She was a plain girl, a predestined old maid, the drudge and butt of the family. She had put by a little money as the village seamstress, but not much—there were so many demands on her. And it turned out to be an expensive business—a terribly expensive business—to bring home and bury a dead hero. And the longer you left him in the care of his grateful government the more expensive it became… . "Unclaimed" was the simple and unsentimental relation of how Tullia Larcom managed to bring Ben Purchase's body back to Green Lick and give him a grave and a headstone… . When Halo finished reading she had forgotten about her husband, forgotten about the cook, forgotten even about her own little emotional flutter over Vance Weston… . All her thoughts were with Tullia at Ben Purchase's grave… .