thers and mothers, though indeed they were culpable. And in
consideration of the subject, Lane excluded all except the better
class of Middleville. It was no difficult task to understand lack of
moral sense in children who were poor and unfortunate, who had to
work, and get what pleasures they had in the streets. But how about
the best families, where there were luxurious homes, books, education,
amusement, kindness, love--all the supposed stimuli needed for the
proper guidance of changeful vagrant minds? These good influences had
failed. There was a greater moral abandonment than would ever be
known.

Before the war Bessy Bell would have presented the perfect type of the
beautiful, highly sensitive, delicately organized girl so peculiarly
and distinctively American. She would have ripened before her time.
Perhaps she would not have been greatly different in feeling from the
old-fashioned girl: only different in that she had restraint, no
deceit.

But after the war--now--what was Bessy Bell? What actuated her? What
was the secret spring of her abnormal tendencies? Were they abnormal?
Bessy was wild to abandon herself to she knew not what. Some glint of
intelligence, some force of character as exceptional in her as it was
wanting in Lorna, some heritage of innate sacredness of person, had
kept Bessy from the abyss. She had absorbed in mind all the impurities
of the day, but had miraculously escaped them in body. If her parents
could have known Bessy as Lane now realized her they would have been
horrified. But Lane's horror was fading. Bessy was illuminating the
darkness of his mind.

To understand more clearly what the war had done to Bessy Bell, and to
the millions of American girls like her, it was necessary for Lane to
understand what the war had done to soldiers, to men, and to the
world.

Lane could grasp some infinitesimal truth of the sublime and horrible
change war had wrought in the souls of soldiers. That change was too
great for any mind but the omniscient to grasp in its entirety. War
had killed in some soldiers a belief in Christ: in others it had
created one. War had unleashed the old hidden primitive instincts of
manhood: likewise it had fired hearts to hate of hate and love of
love, to the supreme ideal consciousness could conceive. War had
brought out the monstrous in men and as well the godlike. Some
soldiers had become cowards; others, heroes. There were thousands of
soldiers who became lions to