Sara Lee was knitting socks now, all a trifle tight as to heel.  “I know,” she would say.  “I’ll get along.  Don’t you worry about me.”

Always these talks ended on a note of exasperation for Aunt Harriet.  For Sara Lee’s statement that she could manage would draw forth a plaintive burst from the older woman.

“If only you’d marry Harvey,” she would say.  “I don’t know what’s come over you.  You used to like him well enough.”

“I still like him.”

“I’ve seen you jump when the telephone bell rang.  Your Uncle James often spoke about it.  He noticed more than most people thought.”  She followed Sara Lee’s eyes down the street to where Anna was wheeling her baby slowly up and down.  Even from that distance Sara Lee could see the bit of pink which was the bow on her afghan.  “I believe you’re afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Of having children,” accused Aunt Harriet fretfully.

Sara Lee colored.

“Perhaps I am,” she said; “but not the sort of thing you think.  I just don’t see the use of it, that’s all.  Aunt Harriet, how long does it take to become a hospital nurse?”

“Mabel Andrews was three years.  It spoiled her looks too.  She used to be a right pretty girl.”

“Three years,” Sara Lee reflected.  “By that time—­”

The house was very quiet and still those days.  There was an interlude of emptiness and order, of long days during which Aunt Harriet alternately grieved and planned, and Sara Lee thought of many things.  At the Red Cross meetings all sorts of stories were circulated; the Belgian atrocity tales had just reached the country, and were spreading like wildfire.  There were arguments and disagreements.  A girl named Schmidt was militant against them and soon found herself a small island of defiance entirely surrounded by disapproval.  Mabel Andrews came once to a meeting and in businesslike fashion explained the Red Cross dressings and gave a lesson in bandaging.  Forerunner of the many first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel’s, and made memorable by one thing she said.

“You might as well all get busy and learn to do such things,” she stated in her brisk voice.  “One of our internes is over there, and he says we’ll be in it before spring.”

After the meeting Sara Lee went up to Mabel and put a hand on her arm.

“Are you going?” she asked.

“Leaving day after to-morrow.  Why?”

“I—­couldn’t I be useful over there?”

Mabel smiled rather grimly.  “What can you do?”

“I can cook.”

“Only men cooks, my dear.  What else?”

“I could clean up, couldn’t I?  There must be something.  I’d do anything I could.  Don’t they have people to wash dishes and—­all that?”

Mabel was on doubtful ground there.  She knew of a woman who had been permitted to take over her own automobile, paying all her expenses and buying her own tires and gasoline.