In his letters to Melia he made no comment on the life he was leading, but in one he told her that they had moved up into the Line; in another that "the Boche had got it in the neck"; in another that "he had got the rheumatics so that he could hardly move," but that he meant to carry on as long as possible, adding, "We are very short of men."
Somehow the letters of that dark winter made her more proud than ever of this man of hers. There was a determined note of quiet cheerfulness that she had never known in him before. Instead of the eternal grumbling that had done so much to embitter her, there was a tone of whimsical humor which at a time made her laugh, although as a general rule few people found it harder than she did to laugh at anything. She had little imagination, still less of the penetration of mind that goes with it, but there was one phrase he used that was hard to forget. In one letter he was tempted to complain that the Boche had taken to raiding them in the middle of the night, but he added a postscript, "It's no use growsing here."
Somehow that phrase stuck in her mind. When she rose before daylight in the bitter mornings of midwinter to light the kitchen fire and prepare a meal she would have to eat alone, she would remember those words which he of all men had used, he who was a born growser if ever there was one. "It's no use growsing here." She tried to take in their meaning, but the task was not easy. He wrote so cheerfully that he could hardly mean what he said. And it was his nearest approach to complaint, he whose life in peace time had been one long complaint. Now and again she read in the _Tribune_ of things that made her shiver. Sometimes in the winter darkness she awoke with these things in her mind. Bill's letters, however, gave no details. If he spoke of "a scrap," he did so casually, without embroidery, yet she remembered that once when he had cut his thumb, not very badly, he fainted at the sight of blood.
Such letters were a puzzle; they told so little. She couldn't make them out. Reading between the lines, he seemed to be enjoying life more than he had ever done, he seemed to realize the humor of it more. It was very strange that it should be so, especially on the part of one who had always taken things so hard. In one letter he said that spring was coming and that the look of the sky made him think of the crocuses along Sharrow Lane, and then added as a brief postscript, "Stanning's gone."