You say in your letter--I certainly was glad to get that letter--well, you say I have things to do more important than "girls." Dora, I think you probably know without my saying so that of course while I have got important things to do, just as every man over here has, and everybody at home, for that matter, well, the thing that is most important in the world to me, next to helping win this war, it's reading the next letter from you.
Don't forget how glad I'll be to get it, and don't forget you didn't have anything to do with my being over here.

That was--it was something else.

And you bet, whatever happens I'm glad I came! Don't ever forget _that_! Dora knew it was "something else." Her memory went back to her first recollection of him in school: from that time on he had been just an ordinary, everyday boy, floundering somehow through his lessons in school and through his sweethearting with Milla, as the millions of other boys floundered along with their own lessons and their own Millas.

She saw him swinging his books and romping homeward from the schoolhouse, or going whistling by her father's front yard, rattling a stick on the fence as he went, care-free and masterful, but shy as a deer if strangers looked at him, and always "not much of a talker." She had always felt so superior to him, she shuddered as she thought of it.

His quiet had been so much better than her talk.