“Gertie was in to-day.  She says I’m a shrimp in my uniform compared to Charley.  You know she always was the nerviest little stenographer we ever had about the place, but she knows more about Featherlooms than any woman in the shop except you.  She’s down to ninety-eight pounds, poor little girl, but every ounce of it’s pure pluck, and she says she’ll be as good as new in a month or two, and I honestly believe she will.”

Emma was counting a neat stack of folded handkerchiefs.  “Seventeen—­eighteen—­When she comes back we’ll have to pay her twice the salary she got when she left.  But, then, you have to pay an errand boy what you used to pay a shipping clerk, and a stock girl demands money that an operator used to brag about—­nineteen—­”

Buck came over to her and put a hand on the bright hair that was rumpled, now, from much diving into bags and suitcases and clothes closets.

“All except you, Emma.  You’ll be working without a salary—­working like a man—­like three men—­”

“Working for three men, T.A.  Three fighting men.  I’ve got two service buttons already,” she glanced down at her blouse, “and Charley Fisk said I had the right to wear one for him.  I’ll look like a mosaic, but I’m going to put ’em all on.”

* * * * *

The day before Emma’s departure for the West Grace arrived, with bags, bundles, and babies.  A wan and tired Grace, but proud, too, and with the spirit of the times in her eyes.

“Jock!” she repeated, in answer to their questions.  “My dears, he doesn’t know I’m alive.  I visited him at camp the day before I left.  He thinks he’ll be transferred East, as we hoped.  Wouldn’t that be glorious!  Well, I had all sorts of intimate and vital things to discuss with him, and he didn’t hear what I was saying.  He wasn’t even listening.  He couldn’t wait until I had finished a sentence so that he could cut in with something about his work.  I murmured to him in the moonlight that there was something I had long meant to tell him and he answered that dammit he forgot to report that rifle that exploded.  And when I said, ’Dearest, isn’t this hotel a little like the place we spent our honeymoon in—­that porch, and all?’ he said, ’See this feller coming, Gracie?  The big guy with the moustache.  Now mash him, Gracie.  He’s my Captain.  I’m going to introduce you.  He was a senior at college when I was a fresh.’”

But the peace and the pride in her eyes belied her words.

Emma’s trip, already delayed, was begun ten days before her husband’s date for sailing.  She bore that, too, with smiling equanimity.  “When I went to school,” she said, “I thought I hated the Second Peloponnesian War worse than any war I’d ever heard of.  But I hate this one so that I want everyone to get into it one hundred per cent., so that it’ll be over sooner; and because we’ve won.”

They said little on their way to the train.  She stood on the rear platform just before the train pulled out.  They had tried frantically to get a lower berth, but unsuccessfully.  “Don’t look so tragic about it,” she laughed.  “It’s like old times.  These last three years have been a dream—­a delusion.”