rs and caps. Tessie's
big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck
was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid
him good-bye. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in
their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suitcases and
their paste-board boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In
their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their
young heads sticking out of the car windows in clusters--black, yellow,
brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one
head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A
great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:

"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a
week, for a visit. Goo'-bye! Goo--"

They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot
platform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children,
shouting.

Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received
equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent
boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable
forms of cake.

Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was
furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in
his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She
tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in
it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of
the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then,
inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New
York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it
turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a
cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as
dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and
I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me
swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make
Hatton's place look sick."

The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among
themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they
could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around.
Well, I should say not!

They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the
type known as a stag. They dressed