One of the men left and he found a seat by the window, next to the soldier. He felt the pressure of the thick shoulder against his own; he did not like sitting that close to other men, especially strangers, but there was no room to pull away. The paratrooper, primed by his admirers, still held forth. The soldier listened with the others; he followed the paratrooper’s words with aloof but polite attention, his hands clasped tight over a wide knee, his elbows rigid at his sides, as if trying to take up as little room as possible. John Grandin felt his tension and he wanted to say: Relax, soldier; so long as you’re in uniform, you’re more than all right with this crowd.

There could hardly have been a greater contrast between the awkward private and the confident, rather sophisticated paratrooper. The difference was so marked that the latter drew all the admiration, and the men paid small attention to the uncomfortable fellow too big for his clothes who sat hunched up on the settee. Whatever exchange of conversation there may have been between him and the others, or between the two soldiers, must have proved unsatisfactory, for the paratrooper dominated the little room as before, as if he were the only uniform present. His cigarette finished, Grandin dropped it into the cuspidor and went out; and as he left, the blond private flashed him a painfully polite and eager smile.

The train was moving slowly through a fashionable parklike community and from the window he saw many pairs of white figures leaping about a series of tennis courts which, unless one looked sharply and concentrated on a certain court and quartet of players, might have been taken for a Manhattan playground alive with tenement children. Tennis balls zigzagged across his vision, blurred by the moving train till they resembled streamers of white tape; and John Grandin was reminded of the continuous tennis match outside his classroom which had had such a distracting effect on him all that spring. . . .