its
sacrifice. That her soul did ache made it worth while.

And the women gathered for this branch Red Cross organization, her
neighbors on the edge of the great city, wives and daughters and mothers
of clerks, and delivery-wagon drivers, and icemen, and night-watchmen,
women who had not known how to take their part in the war work in the
city or had found it too far to go, these came to her house gladly and
all found pleasure in her beautiful room. That made it a joy to give it
up to them. She stood in the doorway, feeling an emphasis in the quiet
of the July afternoon because of the forty voices which had lately gone
out of the sunshiny silence, of the forty busy figures in long, white
aprons and white, sweeping veils, the tiny red cross gleaming over the
forehead of each one, each face lovely in the uniform of service, all
oddly equalized and alike under their veils and crosses. She spoke aloud
as she tossed out her hands to the room:

"War will be over some day, and you will be our own again, but forever
holy because of this. You will be a room of history when you go to
Brock--"

Brock! Would Brock ever come home to the room, to this place which he
loved? Brock, in France! She turned sharply and went out through the
long hall and across the terrace, and sat down where the steps dropped
to the garden, on the broad top step, with her head against the pillar
of the balustrade. Above her the smell of box in a stone vase on the
pillar punctured the mild air with its definite, reminiscent fragrance.
Box is a plant of antecedents of sentiment, of memories. The woman
inhaling its delicate sharpness, was caught back into days past. She
considered, in rapid jumps of thought, events, episodes, epochs. The day
Brock was born, on her own twentieth birthday, up-stairs where the rosy
chintz curtains blew now out of the window; the first day she had come
down to the terrace--it was June--and the baby lay in his bassinet by
the balustrade in that spot--she looked at the spot--the baby, her big
Brock, a bundle of flannel and fine, white stuff in lacy frills of the
bassinet. And she loved him; she remembered how she had loved that baby,
how, laughing at herself, she had whispered silly words over the stolid,
pink head; how the girl's heart of her had all but burst with the
astonishing new tide of a feeling which seemed the greatest of which she
was capable. Yet it was a small thing to the way she loved Brock now. A
vision came of l