Command Decision by William Wister Haines

would never be able to think of her side of it fairly. He had known Helen Garnett since the days when she used to come to Academy Hops. The Garnett size and looks had been designed for men but Helen had the carriage for them and the Garnett habit of authority. Dennis danced with her punctiliously, once at each Hop, as he did with most of the sisters of his classmates. In those days neither Helen nor Cliff encouraged intimacy from Middle Westerners and Dennis did not regret it.
    Thereafter he had seen more of her, at closer quarters, on her occasional visits to outlying posts. Dennis and Cathy both liked Cliff’s wife, Natalie; army life forced propinquity upon them and they had exchanged dinners, played cards, alternated in the hospitality of the weekly movies, and loaned and borrowed food and bathtub gin on a dozen dreary fields from Clark to Bolling. Helen’s visits always touched these exiles, for the girls at least, with the fleeting metropolitan glamour of new clothes and hair styles. To the married men she brought the Washington gossip, shrewdly assessed and evaluated by the insight of three generations of family table talk on military politics.
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    To the young bachelor officers who thronged the houses during her visits she brought the gaiety of visiting royalty, brief, bright dreams of a powerful connection and an expert facility for terminating these hopes without undue pain. Even they seemed to understand and approve the Garnetts’ tacit assumption that Helen belonged to a brighter world than the services offered. For all of his normal acuteness Dennis had been a little surprised the first time Cathy had privately pronounced her cold-blooded.
    In time the Garnetts and Dennises drifted apart to different posts on different assignment. It was following one of these separations that the Dennises had been ordered, as unexpectedly and inconveniently as always, to Washington during the summer while Cathy was having William Mitchell. The orders were only temporary and had caught them in what was even for them a financial crisis. The sweltering, cockroach-ridden little flat on H Street was one of their few unhappy memories.
    By then Ted Martin had become practically a member of the family. With the relative opulence of a bachelor on flying pay he had his own flat in Georgetown, a new car, and an expanding address book which did not run to dowagers. He had come over to the Dennis flat one Sunday with an offer to drive them out of the city heat for dinner just as Cliff was telephoning to ask them across the river for a julep. Cliff had cordially included him in the invitation.
    Two of the previous Generals Garnett had married prudently.
    While Garnett’s Tree was not a mansion the big hall was cool with the river breeze coming in across the terrace and the old Georgian brick wore the languorous charm of its generations with shabby grace. They had stepped from dazzling sunlight on the blue stone drive into a serene antiquity, just as Helen burst into the opposite terrace door, her black hair vivid against a summery white dress.
    She had greeted Cathy and Dennis warmly enough but with the slight inattentiveness she always accorded married people. She had been turning away from her introduction to Ted before the echo of his name caught in her consciousness and she had repeated, as people had begun to repeat that name:
    “Not the Lieutenant Martin…? Why, Cliff never told me he knew you.”
    On the terrace Cliff had introduced them with evident satisfaction to Helen’s fiancé, a prosperous-looking middle-aged stockbroker who sighed amiably over his julep.
    “You fellows have all the fun. What are you two going to do next, Captain Dennis?”
    They had spent a pleasant afternoon over Cliff’s excellent juleps and departed over Helen’s vociferous insistence that they remain for pickup supper. On the way down the river Cathy had kidded Ted about Helen’s obvious interest in him. Ted had replied indifferently that the