“Gad, Emma, you’re glorious!”

“Glorious nothing!  I’m going to earn the living for three families for a few months, until things get going.  And there’s nothing glorious about that, old dear.  I haven’t any illusions about what taking a line on the road means these days.  It isn’t travelling.  It’s exploring.  You never know where you’re going to land, or when, unless you’re travelling in a freight train.  They’re cock o’ the walk now.  I think I’ll check myself through as first-class freight.  Or send my pack ahead, with natives on foot, like an African explorer.  But it’ll be awfully good for me character.  And when I’m eating that criminal corn bread they serve on dining cars on a train that’s seven hours late into Duluth I’ll remember when I had my picture, in uniform, in the Sunday supplements, with my hand on the steering wheel along o’ the nobility and gentry.”

“Listen, dear, I can’t have you—­”

“Too late.  Got a pencil?  Let’s send fifty words to Jock and Grace.  They’ll wire back ‘No!’ but another fifty’ll fetch ’em.  After all, it takes more than one night letter to explain a move that is going to change eight lives.  Now let’s have dinner, dear.  It’ll be cold, but filling.”

Perhaps in the whirlwind ten days that followed a woman of less energy, less determination, less courage and magnificent vitality might have faltered and failed in an undertaking of such magnitude.  But Emma was alert and forceful enough to keep just one jump ahead of the swift-moving times.  In a less cataclysmic age the changes she wrought within a period of two weeks would have seemed herculean.  But in this time of stress and change, when every household in every street in every town in all the country was feeling the tremor of upheaval, the readjustment of this little family and business group was so unremarkable as to pass unnoticed.  Even the members of the group itself, seeing themselves scattered to camp, to France, to New York, to the Middle West, shuffled like pawns that the Great Game might the better be won, felt strangely unconcerned and unruffled.

It was little more than two weeks after the night of Emma’s awakening that she was talking fast to keep from crying hard, as she stuffed plain, practical blue serge garments (unmilitary) into a bellows suitcase ("Can’t count on trunks these days,” she had said.  “I’m not taking any chances on a clean shirtwaist").  Buck, standing in the doorway, tried hard to keep his gaze from the contemplation of his khaki-clad self reflected in the long mirror.  At intervals he said:  “Can’t I help, dear?” Or, “Talk about the early Pilgrim mothers, and the Revolutionary mothers, and the Civil War mothers!  I’d like to know what they had on you, Emma.”

And from Emma:  “Yeh, ain’t I noble!” Then, after a little pause:  “This house is going to be so full of wimmin folks it’ll look like a Home for Decayed Gentlewomen.  Buddy McChesney, aged six months, is going to be the only male protector around the place.  We’ll make him captain of the home guard.”