's a lovely boy, Mrs. Morgan. May you
never raise him to fight."

"I should want him to be as brave as his father, Hodgson."

"Yes. My boy's brave, but it was hard to let him go." Then, struck by
the look on Margaret's face, she said, "Forgive me, ma'am; if mine is
taken from me, I'd like to feel as you do. You ain't makin' other
people unhappy over it."

"I think it is because my husband still lives for me, Hodgson."

Hodgson cried into her apron. "It ain't all of us that has your faith.
But if I loses him, I'll do my best."

And so the painted lady on the stairs saw all the sinister things that
Hilda had brought into the big house swept out of it. She saw Hodgson
the cook trying to be brave, and bringing up Margaret's tea in the
afternoons for the sake of the moment when she might speak of her boy
to one who would understand; she saw Emily, coming home dead tired
after a hard day's work, but with her face illumined. She saw Margaret
smiling, with tears in her heart, she saw Jean putting aside childish
things to become one of the women that the world needed.

Brave women all of them, women with a vision, women raised to heroic
heights by the need of the hour!

The men, too, were heroic. Indeed, the General, trying to control his
appetite, was almost pathetically heroic. He had given up sugar,
although he hated his coffee without it, and he had a little boy's
appetite for pies and cakes.

"When the war is over," he told Teddy, "we will order a cake that's as
high as a house, and we will eat it together."

Teddy giggled. "With frostin'?"

"Yes. I remember when Derry was a lad that we used to tell him the
story of the people who baked a cake so big that they had to climb
ladders to reach the top. Well, that's the kind of cake we'll have."

Yet while he made a joke of it, he confessed to Jean. "It is harder
than fighting battles. I'd rather face a gun than deny myself the
things that I like to eat and drink."

Bronson was contributing to the Red Cross and buying Liberty Bonds, and
that was brave of Bronson. For Bronson was close, and the hardest
thing that he had to do was to part with his money, or to take less
interest than his rather canny investments had made possible.

And Teddy, the man of his family, came one morning to his mother.
"I've just got to do it," he said in a rather shaky voice.

"Do what, dear?"

"Send my books to the soldiers."

She let him do it, although she knew how