n Washington like this," she wrote one day in
February, "we keep only a little fire in the furnace, and I am wearing
flannels for the first time in my life. We dine in sweaters, and the
children are round and rosy in the cold. And the food steams in the
icy air of the dining room, and you can't imagine how different it all
is--with the servants bundled up like the rest of us. We keep your
father warm by burning wood in the fireplace of his room, and we have
given half the coal in the cellar to people who haven't any."

"I am helping Cook with the conservation menus, and it is funny to see
how topsy-turvy everything is. It is perfectly patriotic to eat
mushrooms and lobsters and squabs and ducklings, and it is unpatriotic
to serve sausages and wheat cakes. And Cook can't get adjusted to it.
She will insist upon bacon for breakfast, because well-regulated
families since the Flood have eaten bacon--and she feels that in some
way we are sacrificing self-respect or our social status when we
refrain.

"Your father is such an old dear, Derry. He has war bread and milk for
lunch, and I carry it to him myself in the pretty old porcelain bowl
that he likes so much.

"It was one day when I brought the milk that he spoke of Hilda. 'Where
is she?'

"I told him that she was still in town, and that you had given her a
check which would carry her over a year or two, and he said that he was
glad--that he should not like to see her suffer. The porcelain bowl
had reminded him of her. She had asked him once what it cost, and
after she had found out, she had never used it. She evidently stood
quite in awe of anything so expensive.

"Your mother and I are getting to be very good friends, dearest. When
I am dreadfully homesick for you, I go and sit on the stairs, and she
smiles at me. It is terribly cold in the hall, and I wrap myself up in
your fur coat, and it is almost like having your arms around me."

She was surely making the best of things, this little Jean, when she
found comfort in being mothered by a painted lady on the stairs, and in
being embraced by a fur coat which had once been worn by her husband!

She kept Derry's tin soldier, which Drusilla had given him, on her
desk. "You shall have him when you go to France, but until then he is
a good little comrade, and I say; 'Good-morning' to him and
'Good-night.' Yet I sometimes wonder whether he likes it there on the
shelf, and whether he is crying, 'I want to