the wind and
wet?"

"You know it wouldn't. It would be quite--heavenly--Daddy."

After dinner, Doctor McKenzie read the evening paper. Jean sat on the
rug in front of the fire and knitted for the soldiers. She had made
sweaters until it seemed sometimes as if she saw life through a haze of
olive-drab.

"I am going to knit socks next," she told her father.

He looked up from his paper. "Did you ever stop to think what it means
to a man over there when a woman says 'I'm going to knit socks'?"

Jean nodded. That was one of the charms which her father had for her.
He saw things. It was tired soldiers at this moment, marching in the
cold and needing--socks.

Hilda, having no vision, remarked from the corner where she sat with
her book, "There's no sense in all this killing--I wish we'd kept out
of it."

"Wasn't there any sense," said little Jean from the hearth rug, "in
Bunker Hill and Valley Forge?"

Hilda evaded that. "Anyhow, I'm glad they've stopped playing the
'Star-Spangled Banner' at the movies. I'm tired of standing up."

Jean voiced her scorn. "I'd stand until I dropped, rather than miss a
note of it."

Doctor McKenzie interposed:

"'The time has come,' the Walrus said,
'To talk of many things,
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--'"

"Oh, Daddy," Jean reproached him, "I should think you might be serious."

"I am not just twenty--and I have learned to bank my fires. And you
mustn't take Hilda too literally. She doesn't mean all that she says,
do you, Hilda?"

He patted Miss Merritt on the shoulder as he went out. Jean hated
that. And Hilda's blush.

With the Doctor gone, Hilda shut herself up in the office to balance
her books.

Jean went on with her knitting, Hilda did not knit. When she was not
helping in the office or in the house, her hands lay idle in her lap.

Jean's mind, as she worked, was on those long white hands of Hilda's.
Her own hands had short fingers like her father's. Her mother's hands
had been slender and transparent. Hilda's hands were not slender, they
had breadth as well as length, and the skin was thick. Even the
whiteness was like the flesh of a fish, pale and flabby. No, there was
no beauty at all in Hilda's hands.

Once Jean had criticised them to her father. "I think they are ugly."

"They are useful hands, and they have often helped me."

"I like Emily's hands much better."

"Oh, you and your Emily," he ha