“There was never such a boy,” the General would chant in his deep bass.

“Never,” Jean would pipe in her clear treble.

And when they had chorused thus for a while, the General would dictate a letter to Derry, for his hand was shaky, and Jean would write it out for him, and then she would write a letter of her own, and after that the day was blank, and the night until the next morning when another letter came.  So she lived from letter to letter.

“You have never seen Washington like this,” she wrote one day in February, “we keep only a little fire in the furnace, and I am wearing flannels for the first time in my life.  We dine in sweaters, and the children are round and rosy in the cold.  And the food steams in the icy air of the dining room, and you can’t imagine how different it all is—­with the servants bundled up like the rest of us.  We keep your father warm by burning wood in the fireplace of his room, and we have given half the coal in the cellar to people who haven’t any.”

“I am helping Cook with the conservation menus, and it is funny to see how topsy-turvy everything is.  It is perfectly patriotic to eat mushrooms and lobsters and squabs and ducklings, and it is unpatriotic to serve sausages and wheat cakes.  And Cook can’t get adjusted to it.  She will insist upon bacon for breakfast, because well-regulated families since the Flood have eaten bacon—­and she feels that in some way we are sacrificing self-respect or our social status when we refrain.

“Your father is such an old dear, Derry.  He has war bread and milk for lunch, and I carry it to him myself in the pretty old porcelain bowl that he likes so much.

“It was one day when I brought the milk that he spoke of Hilda.  ’Where is she?’

“I told him that she was still in town, and that you had given her a check which would carry her over a year or two, and he said that he was glad—­that he should not like to see her suffer.  The porcelain bowl had reminded him of her.  She had asked him once what it cost, and after she had found out, she had never used it.  She evidently stood quite in awe of anything so expensive.

“Your mother and I are getting to be very good friends, dearest.  When I am dreadfully homesick for you, I go and sit on the stairs, and she smiles at me.  It is terribly cold in the hall, and I wrap myself up in your fur coat, and it is almost like having your arms around me.”

She was surely making the best of things, this little Jean, when she found comfort in being mothered by a painted lady on the stairs, and in being embraced by a fur coat which had once been worn by her husband!

She kept Derry’s tin soldier, which Drusilla had given him, on her desk.  “You shall have him when you go to France, but until then he is a good little comrade, and I say; ‘Good-morning’ to him and ‘Good-night.’  Yet I sometimes wonder whether he likes it there on the shelf, and whether he is crying, ‘I want to go to the wars—­’”