d Key."

In Elliott's brain Laura's words made a swift connection. Before that,
Ted Gordon had meant nothing to her, the name of a boy whom she had
never seen, a country lad, whose death, while sudden and sad, could
not touch her. Now, suddenly, he clicked into place in her own
familiar world. A Scroll-and-Key man? Why, those were the men she
knew--Bones, Scroll and Key, Hasty Pudding--he was one of them!

She felt a swift recoil. So that was what war came to. Not just natty
figures in khaki that girls cried over in saying good-by to, or smiled
at and told how perfectly splendid they were to go; not just high
adventure and martial music and the rhythm of swinging brown
shoulders; not just surgical dressings and socks and sweaters; not
even just homes broken up for a time and fathers sailing overseas. Of
course one understood with one's brain, that made part of the thrill
of their going, but one didn't realize with the feeling part of
one--how could a girl?--when they went away or when one made
dressings. Yet didn't dressings more than anything else point to it?
And Laura had said we didn't feel the war over here!

A sense of something intolerable, not to be borne, overwhelmed
Elliott. She pushed at it with both hands, as though by the physical
gesture she could shove away the sudden darkness that had blotted with
alien shadow the face of her familiar sun. Death! There was an
unbearable unpleasantness about death. She had always felt ill at ease
in its presence, in the very mention of its name; she had avoided
every sign and symbol of it as she would a plague. And now, she
foresaw for an instant of blinding clarity, perhaps it could not be
avoided any longer. Was this young aviator's accident just a symbol of
the way death was going to invade all the happy sheltered places? The
thought turned the girl sick for a minute. How could Laura go on with
her work so unfeelingly? And there was Priscilla getting out
raspberries.

"I don't see," said Elliott, and her voice choked, "I don't see how
you can _bear_ to peel those potatoes!"

"Some one has to peel them," said Laura. "The family must have dinner,
you know. We couldn't work without eating. Besides, I think it helps
to work."

Elliott brushed the last sentence aside. It fell outside her
experience, and she didn't understand it. The only thing she did
understand was the reiteration of work, work, and the pall of
blackness that overshadowed her hitherto bright world.