“But we’d be willing to die for America’s cause, wouldn’t we?” demanded Hinpoha, with rising excitement.

“We certainly would!” replied Sahwah, with a fine flash from her brown eyes.

“Well, if we’d be perfectly willing to die for our country’s cause, why wouldn’t Veronica be willing to die for hers?” demanded Hinpoha triumphantly.

“What I meant mostly,” said Sahwah, skillfully diverting a discussion that was becoming decidedly heated, “was that none of us are likely to get a chance to die for our country, and neither is Veronica going to get a chance to die for hers, or do anything else for it, even if she were willing to.  She’s just a schoolgirl like ourselves and nobody would think of asking her to do anything.”

“That’s the trouble,” sighed Hinpoha discontentedly.  “We’re just girls, and the only thing we’ll ever get to do is just knit, knit, knit, and there’s no glory in that.  That’s the only ‘bit’ we’ll ever be able to do.”

The other three echoed her sigh and reflected sadly upon their circumscribed sphere, and Sahwah’s dream of being another Joan of Arc flickered out into darkness.  Then she brightened again as her thoughts took a new turn.

“Well, there’s one thing we have to be thankful for,” she said feelingly.  “If we can’t help to make history, we won’t have to learn it, either.  We’re past the history part of school.  But just think what the pupils will have to learn in the years to come—­and the names of all those battles that are being fought every day now, and the unpronounceable names of all those cities in Europe, and all the different generals.  It was hard enough to keep the Civil War generals straight, and there were only two sets of them—­think of having to remember all the American and English and French and Italian and Russian ones, to say nothing of the German!  Why, it will be such a chore to study history that the pupils won’t have time to study anything else!  People always look at little babies and say how fortunate they are; when they grow up the war will be over and everything lovely again, but I always think, ‘Poor things, wait until they have to study history!’ How lucky we are to be living through it instead of having to learn it out of books!”

All the while Sahwah was talking, Hinpoha had been watching with undisguised interest a man who sat in the seat directly across the aisle from them, who, with an artist’s sketching pad on his knee, was drawing caricatures with a thick black pencil.  Hinpoha, clever artist that she was herself, took a lively interest in anyone else who could draw, and from the glimpses she could get of the sketches being made across the aisle, she recognized the peculiar genius of the artist.  She attracted the attention of the other three, and they too watched in wonder and with ever-growing interest.  The artist finally looked up, saw the four eager pairs of eyes fastened on him, and nodding in a friendly way, handed his sketch-book across the aisle.