the city frozen
and white, and with not enough coal to go around, with many of the
rooms in the house shut that fuel might be conserved, with Margaret and
the children and Nurse installed as guests at the General's until the
weather grew warmer, with Emily transforming her Toy Shop into a
surgical dressings station, and with her father-in-law turning over to
her incredible amounts of money for the Red Cross and Liberty Bonds and
War Stamps, life began to take on new aspects of responsibility and
seriousness.

She could never have kept her balance in the midst of it all, if Derry
had not written every day. Her father wrote every day, also, but there
were long intervals between his letters, and then they were apt to
arrive all at once, a great packet of them, to be read and re-read and
passed around.

But Derry's letters, brought to her room every morning by Bronson,
contained the elixir which sent her to her day's work with shining eyes
and flushed cheeks. Sometimes she read bits of them to Bronson.
Sometimes, indeed, there were only a few lines for herself, for Derry
was being intensively trained in a Southern camp, working like an ant,
with innumerable other ants, all in olive-drab, with different colored
cords around their hats.

Sometimes she read bits of the letters to Margaret at breakfast, and
after breakfast she would go up to the General and read everything to
him except the precious words which Derry had meant for her very own
self.

And then she and the General would tell each other how really
extraordinary Derry was!

It was a never-failing subject, of intense interest to both of them.
For there was always this to remember, that if the world was no longer
a radiant and shining world, if the day's task was hard, and if now and
then in the middle of the night she wept tears of loneliness, if there
were heavy things to bear, and hard things and sad things, one fact
shone brilliantly above all others, Derry was as wonderful as ever!

"There was never such a boy," the General would chant in his deep bass.

"Never," Jean would pipe in her clear treble.

And when they had chorused thus for a while, the General would dictate
a letter to Derry, for his hand was shaky, and Jean would write it out
for him, and then she would write a letter of her own, and after that
the day was blank, and the night until the next morning when another
letter came. So she lived from letter to letter.

"You have never see