Tessie, taking the hatpins out of her hat on her way upstairs, met this coolly.  “Yeh, I ran into her comin’ back.”

Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared up into the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides.  Oh, well, what’s the diff?  You had to make the best of it.  Everybody makin’ a fuss about the soldiers:  feedin’ ’em, and askin’ ’em to their houses, and sendin’ ‘em things, and givin’ dances and picnics and parties so they wouldn’t be lonesome.  Chuck had told her all about it.  The other boys told the same.  They could just pick and choose their good times.  Tessie’s mind groped about, sensing a certain injustice.  How about the girls?  She didn’t put it thus squarely.  Hers was not a logical mind, trained to think.  Easy enough to paw over the menfolks and get silly over brass buttons and a uniform.  She put it that way.  She thought of the refrain of a popular song:  “What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?” Tessie, smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the words deftly:  “What’re you going to do to help the girls?” she demanded.  “What’re you going to do—­” She rolled over on one side and buried her head in her arms.

* * * * *

There was news again next morning at the watch factory.  Tessie of the old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest bit of gossip.  Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first.  But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world about her.  The Chippewa Courier went into the newspaper pile behind the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie’s incurious eye.

She was late this morning.  As she sat down at the bench and fitted her glass in her eye the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness.

“An’ they say she never screeched or fainted or anything.  She stood there, kind of quiet, lookin’ straight ahead, and then all of a sudden she ran to her pa—­”

“Both comin’ at once, like that—­”

“I feel sorry for her.  She never did anything to me.  She—­”

Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about her and gathering them into a whole.  “Say, who’s the heroine of this picture?  Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the story.  I come in in the middle of the reel, I guess.”

They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have ugly news to tell.  They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voices high with the note of hysteria.

“Angie Hatton’s beau was killed—­”

“They say his aireoplane fell ten thousan’ feet—­”

“The news come only last evenin’ about eight—­”

“She won’t see nobody but her pa—­”