Lane went home to his room and earnestly gave himself up to the perusal of the writings Bessy Bell had given him.  He experienced shocks of pain and wonder, between which he had to laugh.  All the fiendish wit of youthful ingenuity flashed forth from this verse.  There was a parody on Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break,” featuring Colonel Pepper’s famous and deplorable habit.  Miss Hill came in for a great share of opprobrium.  One verse, if it had ever come under the eyes of the good schoolteacher, would have broken her heart.

Lane read all Bessy’s verses, and then the packet of notes written by Bessy’s girl friends.  The truth was unbelievable.  Yet here were the proofs.  Over Bessy and her friends Lane saw the dim dark shape of a ghastly phantom, reaching out, enfolding, clutching.  He went downstairs to the kitchen and here he burned the writings.

“It ought to be told,” he muttered.  “But who’s going to tell it?  Who’d believe me?  The truth would not be comprehended by the mothers of Middleville....  And who’s to blame?”

It would not do, Lane reflected, to place the blame wholly upon blind fathers and mothers, though indeed they were culpable.  And in consideration of the subject, Lane excluded all except the better class of Middleville.  It was no difficult task to understand lack of moral sense in children who were poor and unfortunate, who had to work, and get what pleasures they had in the streets.  But how about the best families, where there were luxurious homes, books, education, amusement, kindness, love—­all the supposed stimuli needed for the proper guidance of changeful vagrant minds?  These good influences had failed.  There was a greater moral abandonment than would ever be known.

Before the war Bessy Bell would have presented the perfect type of the beautiful, highly sensitive, delicately organized girl so peculiarly and distinctively American.  She would have ripened before her time.  Perhaps she would not have been greatly different in feeling from the old-fashioned girl:  only different in that she had restraint, no deceit.

But after the war—­now—­what was Bessy Bell?  What actuated her?  What was the secret spring of her abnormal tendencies?  Were they abnormal?  Bessy was wild to abandon herself to she knew not what.  Some glint of intelligence, some force of character as exceptional in her as it was wanting in Lorna, some heritage of innate sacredness of person, had kept Bessy from the abyss.  She had absorbed in mind all the impurities of the day, but had miraculously escaped them in body.  If her parents could have known Bessy as Lane now realized her they would have been horrified.  But Lane’s horror was fading.  Bessy was illuminating the darkness of his mind.

To understand more clearly what the war had done to Bessy Bell, and to the millions of American girls like her, it was necessary for Lane to understand what the war had done to soldiers, to men, and to the world.