Brave women all of them, women with a vision, women raised to heroic heights by the need of the hour!

The men, too, were heroic.  Indeed, the General, trying to control his appetite, was almost pathetically heroic.  He had given up sugar, although he hated his coffee without it, and he had a little boy’s appetite for pies and cakes.

“When the war is over,” he told Teddy, “we will order a cake that’s as high as a house, and we will eat it together.”

Teddy giggled.  “With frostin’?”

“Yes.  I remember when Derry was a lad that we used to tell him the story of the people who baked a cake so big that they had to climb ladders to reach the top.  Well, that’s the kind of cake we’ll have.”

Yet while he made a joke of it, he confessed to Jean.  “It is harder than fighting battles.  I’d rather face a gun than deny myself the things that I like to eat and drink.”

Bronson was contributing to the Red Cross and buying Liberty Bonds, and that was brave of Bronson.  For Bronson was close, and the hardest thing that he had to do was to part with his money, or to take less interest than his rather canny investments had made possible.

And Teddy, the man of his family, came one morning to his mother.  “I’ve just got to do it,” he said in a rather shaky voice.

“Do what, dear?”

“Send my books to the soldiers.”

She let him do it, although she knew how it tore his heart.  You see, there were the Jungle Books, which he knew the soldiers would like, and “Treasure Island,” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” and “Huckleberry Finn.”  He brought his fairy books, too, and laid them on the altar of patriotism, and “Toby Tyler,” which had been his father’s, and “Under the Lilacs,” which he adored because of little brown-faced Ben and his dog, Sancho.

He was rapturously content when his mother decided that the fairy books and Toby and brown-faced Ben might still be his companions.  “You see the soldiers are men, dear, and they probably read these when they were little boys.”

“But won’t I wead them when I grow up, Mother?”

“You may want to read older books.”

But Teddy was secretly resolved that age should not wither nor custom stale the charms of the beloved volumes.  And that he should love them to the end.  His mother thought that he might grow tired of them some day and told him so.

“I can wead them to my little boys,” he said, hopefully, “and to their little boys after that,” and having thus established a long line of prospective worshippers of his own special gods, he turned to other things.

General Drake, growing gradually better, went now and then in his warm closed car for a ride through the Park.  Usually Jean was with him, or Bronson, and now and then Nurse with the children.

It was one morning when the children were with him that he said to Nurse:  “Take them into the Lion House for a half hour, I’ll drive around and come back for you.”