verpool in a hamper; the uproarious drive the
four of them--Hugh, the two boys, and herself--and Mavourneen had taken
in a taxi across the city. The puppy, astonished and investigating
throughout the whole proceeding, had mounted all of them, separately and
together, and insisted on lying in big Hugh's lap, crying
broken-heartedly at not being allowed. How they had shouted laughter,
the four and the boy taxi-driver, all the journey, till they ached! What
good times they had always had together, the young father and mother and
the two big sons! She reflected how she had not been at all the
conventional mother of sons. She had not been satisfied to be gentle and
benevolent and look after their clothes and morals. She had lived their
lives with them, she had ridden and gone swimming with them, and played
tennis and golf, and fished and shot and skated and walked with them,
yes, and studied and read with them, all their lives.

"I haven't any respect for my mother," young Hugh told her one day. "I
like her like a sister."

She was deeply pleased at this attitude; she did not wish their respect
as a visible quality. Vision after vision came of the old times and
care-free days while the four, as happy and normal a family as lived in
the world, passed their alert, full days together before the war. Memory
after memory took form in the brain of the woman, the center of that
light-hearted life so lately changed, so entirely now a memory. War had
come.

At first, in 1914, there had been excitement, astonishment. Then the
horror of Belgium. One refused to believe that at first; it was a lurid
slander on the kindly German people; then one believed with the brain;
one's spirit could not grasp it. Unspeakable deeds such as the Germans'
deeds--it was like a statement made concerning a fourth dimension of
space; civilized modern folk were not so organized as to realize the
facts of that bestiality.

"Aren't you thankful we're Americans?" the woman had said over and over.

One day her husband, answering usually with a shake of the head,
answered in words. "We may be in it yet," he said. "I'm not sure but we
ought to be."

Brock, twenty-one then, had flashed at her: "I want to be in it. I may
just have to be, mother."

Young Hugh yawned a bit at that, and stretching his long arm, he patted
his brother's shoulder. "Good old hero, Brock! I'll beat you a set of
tennis. Come on."

That sudden speech of Brock's had startled her, had