ll largely a
matter of financial pressure. The pressure, even if exerted at long
range, was bound to tell. Many of "our boys" would never get "over
there" at all. They were learning how to safeguard our country's future
within our country itself.

His wife, who had been flitting from veranda to veranda in their
pleasant suburban environment, and been doing, with other ladies of her
circle, some desultory work for the wounded soldiers of the future, now
came down to the centre of the town and took up the work in good
earnest. She saw Tom McComas as a seasoned adult who could look after
himself, but her own Albert was still a boy. It was easy to see him
freezing, soaking, falling, lying in distress. She busied herself behind
a great plate-glass window on a frequented thoroughfare--a window heaped
with battered helmets and emptied shells that drew the idle curiosity or
the poignant interest of the passer-by. Bandages, sweaters, iodine-tubes
filled her thoughts and her hands. And Althea, in company with several
sprightly and entertaining young girls of her own set, began to pick up
some elementary notions in nursing.

"Why, it's the most delightfully absorbing thing I've ever done!" she
declared. A new world was dawning--a red world that not all of us have
been fated to meet so young.

Raymond Prince saw all these preparations and took them as a spectacle.
He was now frankly but an onlooker in life, and he gazed at big things
from their far rim. He had no spare funds to put into federal hands, and
felt by no means able to afford the conversion of any of his few
remaining investments with a loss of nearly half his present returns. He
viewed a patriotic parade or two from the curbstone and attended now
and then some patriotic meeting in the public parks--a flag-raising, for
example. On these occasions he preferred to stand at some remove, so
that it would be unnecessary to raise his hat: the requirement of a
formal salute made him distressingly self-conscious. Yet he was
displeased if other men, no nearer, failed to lift theirs; and he would
be indignant when young fellows, engaged in games near by, gave the
exercises no heed at all.

In one of the parades the flag of France went by. This was a picturesque
and semi-exotic event; it stirred some memories of early days abroad,
and Raymond, with an effort, did, stiffly and with an obvious (even an
obtrusive) self-consciousness, manage to get off his hat. A highly vocal
youn