He suffered about equally from the pains of continence and the pangs of remorse. In one of his darkest and guiltiest moods he wrote Vera releasing her from her marriage vows. She wrote back calmly that she intended to keep her marriage vows as long as she could, adding that if she found she couldn’t she would not make it any worse by telling him, at least while he was still away. George marveled once more that of all the one billion seven hundred ninety-four million female humans in the world—he worked the figure out with the help of an encyclopedia in a Salvation Army hostel—he had found the only one with an unforgettable body, a pure, forgiving heart, and a boundless store of common sense.
He depended on Vera almost exclusively for news from home, and her news was almost always good and
