and death is on every side of them, and horror--.
Some of the women who come to the shop sentimentalize a lot. One woman
recited, 'Break, break, break--, the other day, and the rest of them
cried into the gauze, _cried for themselves_, if you please; 'For men
must work and women must weep.' And then my little blonde told them
what she thought of them. Her name is 'Maisie,' wouldn't you know a
girl like that would be called 'Maisie'?

"'If you think,' she said, 'that you suffer--what in God's name will
you think before the war is over? It hasn't touched you. You won't
know what suffering means until your men begin to come home. You talk
about hardships; not one of you has gone hungry yet--and the men over
there may be cut off at any moment from food supplies, and they are
always at the mercy of the camp cooks, who may or may not give them
things that they can eat. And they lie out under the stars with their
wounds, and if any of you has a finger ache, you go to bed with hot
water bottles and are coddled and cared for. But our boys,--there
isn't anyone to coddle them--they have to stick it out. And we've got
to stick it out--and not be sorry for ourselves. Oh, why should we be
sorry for ourselves!' The tears were streaming down her cheeks when
she finished, and a gray-haired woman who had wept with the others got
up and came over to her. 'My dear,' she said, 'I shall never pity
myself again. My two sons are over there, and I've been thinking how
much I have given. But they have given their young lives, their
futures--their bodies, to be broken--' And then standing right in the
middle of the Toy Shop that mother prayed for her sons, and for the
sons of other women, and for the husbands and lovers, and that the
women might be brave.

"Oh, it was wonderful--as she stood there like a white-veiled
prophetess, praying.

"Yet a year ago she would have died rather than pray in public. She is
a conservative, aristocratic woman, the kind that doesn't wear rings or
try to be picturesque--and she has always kept her feelings to herself,
and said her prayers to herself--or in church, but never in all her
life has she been so fine as she was the other day praying in the Toy
Shop.

"Yet in a way I am sorry for myself. Not for me as I am to-day, but
for the Jean of Yesterday, who thought that patriotism was remembering
Bunker Hill!

"Of course in a way it is that--for Bunker Hill and Lexington and
Valley Forge are