Those were great days—­days when America, the world’s experiment in democracy, was thrown into those fires that consume or purify.  The great test was on, whether such a nation could live, and Boston was athrob with love of country and eagerness to sacrifice.  The young, beautiful, clear-eyed girl did not hesitate a moment to urge Henry Blaine to give up all and go to the front.  It was like tearing her own heart in two, and, possibly at a word, Blaine would have remained in Boston and helped in some other way.  But she fought it out with him one night on Boston Commons, and she wished then that she was a man and could go herself.  On that clear, mild night, the blue luminous tinge of whose moon she remembered so vividly, they walked up and down, they passionately embraced, they felt the end of life and the mystery of death, and then at last when the young man said:  “I’ll go!  It’s little enough to do in this crisis!” she clung to him with pride and sacred joy and knew that life was very great and that it had endless possibilities.

And so Henry Blaine went with his regiment, and the black and terrible years set in—­years in which so often she saw what Walt Whitman had seen: 

  “I saw askant the armies,
  I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
  Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw
     them,
  And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
  And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),
  And the staffs all splinter’d and broken. 
  I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
  And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them. 
  I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

  But I saw they were not as was thought. 
  They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not,
  The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
  And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
  And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.”

Terrible years, years of bulletins, years of want, hard times, years when all the future was at stake, until finally that day in New York when she saw the remnant returning, marching up Broadway between the black crowds and the bunting, the drums beating, the fifes playing,

  “Returning, with thinned ranks, young, yet very old,
  worn, marching, noticing nothing.”

Henry Blaine was one of these and he came to her a cripple, an emaciated and sick man.  Then had followed, as Joe knew, the marriage, the hard pioneer life in the shanty on the stony hill, the death, and the long widowhood....

Had she not a right to speak to him?

“Understand?” she ended.  “I think, Joe, I ought to understand....  I sent your father into the war....”

Depth beneath depth he was discovering her.  He was amazed and awed.  He asked himself where he had been all these years, and how he had been so blind.  He felt very young then.  It was she who actually knew what the word social and the word patriotism meant.