"I can see I never should have left you alone," Phineas went on before I could recover from the
impact of finding him there, "Where did you get those clothes!" His bright, indignant eyes swept
from my battered gray cap, down the frayed sweater and paint-stained pants to a pair of
clodhoppers. "You don't have to advertise like that, we all know you're the worst dressed man in
the class."
"I've been working, that's all These are just work clothes."
"In the boiler room?"
"On the railroad. Shoveling snow."
He sat back in the chair. "Shoveling railroad snow. Well that makes sense, we always did that the
first term."
I pulled off the sweater, under which I was wearing a rain slicker I used to go sailing in, a kind of
canvas sack. Phineas just studied it in wordless absorption. "I like the cut of it," he finally
murmured. I pulled that off revealing an Army fatigue shirt my brother had given me. "Very
topical," said Phineas through his teeth. After that came off there was just my undershirt, stained
with sweat. He smiled at it for a while and then said as he heaved himself out of the chair, "There. You should have worn that all day, just that. That has real taste. The rest of your outfit
was just gilding that lily of a sweat shirt."
"Glad to hear you like it."
"Not at all," he replied ambiguously, reaching for a pair of crutches which leaned against the
desk.
I took the sight of this all right, I had seen him on crutches the year before when he broke his
ankle playing football. At Devon crutches had almost as many athletic associations as shoulder
pads. And I had never seen an invalid whose skin glowed with such health, accenting the sharp
clarity of his eyes, or one who used his arms and shoulders on crutches as though on parallel
bars, as though he would do a somersault on them if he felt like it. Phineas vaulted across the
room to his cot, yanked back the spread and then groaned. "Oh Christ, it's not made up. What is
all this crap about no maids?"
"No maids," I said. "After all, there's a war on. It's not much of a sacrifice, when you think of
people starving and being bombed and all the other things." My unselfishness was responding
properly to the influences of 1942. In these past months Phineas and I had grown apart on this; I
felt a certain disapproval of him for grumbling about a lost luxury, with a war on. "After all," I
repeated, "there is a war on."
"Is there?" he murmured absently. I didn't pay any attention; he was always speaking when his
thoughts were somewhere else, asking rhetorical questions and echoing other people's words.
I found some sheets and made up his bed for him. He wasn't a bit sensitive about being helped,
