A Very Short Story

It was first published as a vignette, or chapter, in the 1924 Paris edition titled In Our Time, and later rewritten and added to Hemingway's first American short story collection In Our Time, published by Boni & Liveright in 1925.

In the story, a World War I soldier and a nurse named "Luz" fall in love as she tends to him over the course of three months in a hospital in Padua.

They decide to marry, but when the soldier returns home to the United States, he receives a letter from Luz with the news that she has fallen in love with an officer.

Shortly afterward, the soldier contracts gonorrhea from a sexual encounter in a taxi.

Hemingway based the story on his World War I affair with Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse he met in Milan while recuperating in the hospital from leg injuries sustained at the Italian front.