Great Scott! She ought not to leave a child as young as that."

Jackson smiled.

"She's going to fix that, all right. She wants to do it. And we're all
right so far I had saved a little."

Then there were women like that! Women who would not only let their men
go to war, but who would leave their homes and enter the struggle for
bread, to help them do it.

"She says it's the right thing," volunteered Jackson, proudly. Women who
felt that a man going into the service was a right thing. Women who saw
war as a duty to be done, not a wild adventure for the adventurous.

"You ought to be very proud of her," he said slowly. "There are not many
like that."

"Well," Jackson said, apologetically, "they'll come round, sir. Some of
them kind of hate the idea, just at first. But I look to see a good many
doing what my wife's doing."

Clayton wondered grimly what Jackson would think if he knew that at that
moment he was passionately envious of him, of his uniform, of the youth
that permitted him to wear that uniform, of his bronzed skin, of his
wife, of his pride in that wife.

"You're a lucky chap, Jackson," he said. "I sent for you because I
wanted to say that, as long as you are in the national service, I shall
feel that you are on a vacation"--he smiled at the word--"on pay. Under
those circumstances, I owe you quite a little money."

Jackson was too overwhelmed to reply at once.

"As a matter of fad," Clayton went on, "it's a national move, in a way.
You don't owe any gratitude. We need our babies, you see. More than we
do hats! If this war goes on, we shall need a good many boy babies."

And his own words suddenly crystallized the terror that was in him. It
was the boys who would go; boys who whistled in the morning; boys who
dreamed in the spring, long dreams of romance and of love.

Boys. Not men like himself, with their hopes and dreams behind them. Not
men who had lived enough to know that only their early dreams were real.
Not men, who, having lived, knew the vast disillusion of living and were
ready to die.

It was only after Jackson had gone that he saw the fallacy of his own
reasoning. If to live were disappointment, then to die, still dreaming
the great dream, was not wholly evil. He found himself saying,

"To earn some honorable advancement for one's soul."

Deep down in him, overlaid with years of worldliness, there was a belief
in a life after death. He looked out the window at the little, changing