"But you were not obliged to go?"
"No; I was not under your father's orders. I doubt if I would have consented if I had n't been shown your picture. I could n't very well refuse then."
She sat with hands clasped together, her eyes shadowed by long lashes.
"I should have thought there would have been some soldiers there--his own men."
"There were," dryly, "but the army just now is recruited out of pretty tough material. To be in the ranks is almost a confession of good-for-nothingness. You are an officer's daughter and understand this to be true."
"Yes," she answered doubtfully. "I have been brought up thinking so; only, of course, there are exceptions."
"No doubt, and I hope I am already counted one."
"You know you are. My father trusted you, and so do I."
"I have wondered some times," he said musingly, watching her face barely visible in the dawn, "whether those of your class actually considered us as being really human, as anything more valuable than mere food for powder. I came into the regular army at the close of the war from the volunteer service. I was accustomed to discipline and all that, and knew my place. But I never suspected then that a private soldier was considered a dog. Yet that was the first lesson I was compelled to learn. It has been pretty hard sometimes to hold in, for there was a time when I had some social standing and could resent an insult."
She was looking straight at him, surprised at the bitterness in his voice.
"They carry it altogether too far," she said. "I have often thought that--mostly the young officers, the West Pointers--and yet you know that the majority of enlisted men are--well, dragged from the slums. My father says it has been impossible to recruit a good class since the war closed, that the right kind had all the army they wanted."
"Which is true enough, but there are good men nevertheless, and every commander knows it. A little considerate treatment would make them better still."
She shook her head questioningly.
"I do not know," she admitted. "I suppose there are two viewpoints. You were in the volunteers, you said. Why did you enlist in the regulars?"
"Largely because I liked soldiering, or thought I did. I knew there would be plenty of fighting out here, and, I believed, advancement."
"You mean to a commission?"
"Yes. You see, I did not understand then the impossibility, the great gulf fixed. I dreamed that good fortune might give me something to do worth while."
"And fate has been unkind?"