She was very busy every morning in Emily’s room, working on the surgical dressings.  She hated it all.  She hated the oakum and the gauze, the cotton and the compresses, the pneumonia jackets and the split-irrigation pads, the wipes, the triangulars, the many-tailed and the scultetus.  Other women might speak lightly of five-yard rolls as dressing for stumps, of paper-backs “used in the treatment of large suppurating wounds.”  Jean shivered and turned white at these things.  Her vivid imagination went beyond the little work-room with its white-veiled women to those hospitals back of the battle line where mutilated men lay waiting for the compresses and the wipes and the bandages, men in awful agony—.

But the lesson she was learning was that of harnessing her emotions to the day’s work; and if her world was no longer wonderful in a care-free sense, it was a rather splendid world of unselfishness and self-sacrifice, although she was not conscious of this, but felt it vaguely.

She wore now, most of the time, her nun’s frock of gray, which had seemed to foreshadow something of her future on that glorified day when Derry had first come to her.  She had laid away many of her lovely things, and one morning Teddy remarked on the change.

“You don’t dwess up any more.”

Nurse stood back of his chair.  “Dress—­”

“Dur-wess.”

“Don’t you like this dress, Teddy?”

“I liked the boo one.”

“Blue—­”

“Ble-yew, an’ the pink one, and all the shiny ones you used to wear at night.”

“Blue dresses and pink dresses and shiny dresses cost a lot of money, Teddy, and I shouldn’t have any money left for Thrift Stamps.”

Thrift stamps were a language understood by Teddy, as he would not have understood the larger transactions of Liberty Bonds.  He and the General held long conversations as to the best means of obtaining a large supply of stamps, and the General having listened to Margaret who wanted the boy to work for his offering, suggested an entrancing plan.  Teddy was to feed the fishes in the dining-room aquarium, he was to feed Muffin, and he was to feed Polly Ann.

It sounded simple, but there were difficulties.  In the first place he had to face Cook, and Cook hated to have children in the kitchen.

“But you’d have to face more than that if you were grown up and in the trenches.  And Hodgson is really very kind.”

“Well, she doesn’t look kind, Mother.”

“Why not?”

“Well, she doesn’t smile, and her face is wed.”

“Red, dear.”

“Ur-ed—.  And when I ask her for milk for Polly, she says ’Milk for cats,’ and when she gets it out, she slams the ’frigerator door.”

“Refrigerator, dear.”

“Rif-iggerator.”

But in the main Teddy went to his task valiantly.  He conserved bones for Muffin and left-over corn-meal cakes.  Polly Ann dined rather monotonously on fish boiled with war-bread crusts, on the back of Cook’s big range.  Hodgson was conscientious and salted it and cooled it, and kept it in a little covered granite pail, and it was from this pail that Teddy ladled stew into Polly Ann’s blue saucer.  “Mother says it is very good of you, Hodgson, to take so much trouble.”