He scrambled to his feet and padded to her side on rosy bare feet.  “Mother, you’ll have to ’tay here, anyhow.  You know I can’t do those back buttons.  And I always get my drawer-legs twisted up with my both legs inside my one leg.”

Marise compromised.  “Well, yes, if you’ll hurry.  But not if you dawdle.  Mother has a lot to do this morning.  Remember, I won’t help you with a single thing you can do yourself.”

The child obediently unbuttoned his pajamas and stepping out of them reached for his undershirt.  His mother, looking at him, fell mentally on her knees before the beautiful, living body.  “Oh, my son, the straight, strong darling!  My precious little son!” She shook with that foolish aching anguish of mothers, intolerable. . . .  “Why must he stop being so pure, so safe?  How can I live when I am no longer strong enough to protect him?”

Mark remarked plaintively, shrugging himself into the sleeves of his shirt, “I’ve roden on a horse, and I’ve roden on a dog, and I’ve even roden on a cow, but I’ve never roden on a camel, and I want to.”

The characteristic Mark-like unexpectedness of this made her smile.

“You probably will, some day,” she said, sitting down.

“But I’ve never even sawn a camel,” complained Mark.  “And Elly and Paul have, and a elephant too.”

“Well, you’re big enough to be taken to the circus this year,” his mother promised him.  “This very summer we’ll take you.”

“But I want to go now!” clamored Mark, with his usual disregard of possibilities, done in the grand style.

“Don’t dawdle,” said his mother, looking around for something to read, so that she would seem less accessible to conversation.  She found the newspaper under her hand, on the table, and picked it up.  She had only glanced at the head-lines yesterday.  It took a lot of moral courage to read the newspapers in these days.  As she read, her face changed, darkened, set.

The little boy, struggling with his underwear, looked at her and decided not to ask for help.

She was thinking as she read, “The Treaty muddle worse than ever.  Great Britain sending around to all her colonies asking for the biggest navy in the world.  Our own navy constantly enlarged at enormous cost.  Constantinople to be left Turkish because nobody wants anybody else to have it.  Armenian babies dying like flies and evening cloaks advertised to sell for six hundred dollars.  Italy land-grabbing.  France frankly for anything except the plain acceptance of the principles we thought the war was to foster.  The same reaction from those principles starting on a grand scale in America.  Men in prison for having an opinion . . . what a hideous bad joke on all the world that fought for the Allies and for the holy principles they claimed!  To think how we were straining every nerve in a sacred cause two years ago.  Neale’s enlistment.  Those endless months of loneliness.  That constant terror about him.  And homes like that all over the world . . . with this as the result.  Could it have been worse if we had all just grabbed what we could get for ourselves, and had what satisfaction we could out of the baser pleasures?”