.

"So soon passeth it away, and we are gone."

He saw Mr. Davis, sitting alone in his house; he saw Ellen moving about
that quiet upper room; he saw Cusick lying on the ground beside the
smoldering heap that had been the barn, and staring up with eyes that
saw only the vast infinity that was the sky. All the struggling and the
fighting, and it came to that.

He picked up the telephone book at last, and finding the hospital list
in the directory began his monotonous calling of numbers, and still the
revolt was in his mind. Even life lay through the gates of death; daily
and hourly women everywhere laid down their lives that some new soul be
born. But the revulsion came with that, a return to something nearer the
normal. Daily and hourly women lived, having brought to pass the miracle
of life.

At half-past four he located Edith at the Memorial, and learned that her
child had been born dead, but that she was doing well. He was suddenly
exhausted; he sat down on a stool before the counter, and with his arms
across it and his head on them, fell almost instantly asleep. When he
waked it was almost seven and the intermittent sounds of early morning
came through the closed doors, as though the city stirred but had not
wakened.

He went to the door and opened it, looking out. He had been wrong
before. Death was a beginning and not an end; it was the morning of the
spirit. Tired bodies lay down to sleep and their souls wakened to the
morning, rested; the first fruits of them that slept.

From the chimneys of the houses nearby small spirals of smoke began to
ascend, definite promise of food and morning cheer behind the closed
doors, where the milk bottles stood like small white sentinels and the
morning paper was bent over the knob. Morning in the city, with children
searching for lost stockings and buttoning little battered shoes; with
women hurrying about, from stove to closet, from table to stove; with
all burdens a little lighter and all thoughts a little kinder. Morning.

CHAPTER XLI

In her bed in the maternity ward Edith at first lay through the days,
watching the other women with their babies, and wondering over the
strange instinct that made them hover, like queer mis-shaped ministering
angels, over the tiny quivering bundles. Some of them were like herself,
or herself as she might have been, bearing their children out of
wedlock. Yet they faced their indefinite futures impassively, content
in relief fro