“Your father has had two letters from her since the day when he saw her in the Park.  Bronson always brings the mail to me, and you know what a distinctive hand Hilda writes, there is no mistaking it.  Your father dropped the letters into the fire, but she ought not to write to him, Derry, and I should like to tell her so.

“But if I told her, she would laugh at me, and that would be the end of it.  For you can’t rage and tear and rant at a thing that is as cold as stone.  Oh, my dearest, I need you so much to tell me what to do, and yet I would not have you here—­

“I met Alma Drew the other day, and she said, as lightly as you please, ‘Do you know, I can’t quite fancy Derry Drake in the trenches.’

“I looked at her for a minute before I could answer, and then I said, ‘I can fancy him with his back to the wall, fighting a thousand Huns—!’

“She shrugged her shoulders, ‘You’re terribly in love.’

“‘I am,’ I said, and I hope I said it calmly, ’but there’s more than love in a woman’s belief in her husband’s bravery—­there’s respect.  And it’s something rather—­sacred, Alma.’  And then I choked up and couldn’t say another word, and she looked at me in a rather stunned fashion for a moment, and then she said, ’Gracious Peter, do you love him like that?’ and I said, ‘I do,’ and she laughed in a funny little way, and said, ‘I thought it was his millions.’

“I was perfectly furious.  But you can’t argue with such people.  I know I was as white as a sheet.  ‘If anything should happen to Derry,’ I said, ‘do you think that all the money in the world would comfort me?’

“She stopped smiling.  ‘It would comfort me,’ then suddenly she held out her hand.  ’But I fancy you’re different, and Derry is a lucky fellow.’ which was rather nice and human of her, wasn’t it?

“Life is growing more complicated than ever here in Washington.  The crowds pour in as if the Administration were a sort of Pied Piper and had played a time, and the people who have lived here all their lives are waking to something like activity.  Great buildings are going up as if some Aladdin had rubbed a lamp—.  None of us are doing the things we used to do.  We don’t even talk about the things we used to talk about, and we go around in blue gingham and caps, and white linen and veils, and we hand out sandwiches to the soldiers and sailors, and drive perfectly strange men in our cars on Government errands, and make Liberty Bond Speeches from many platforms, and all the old theories of what women should do are forgotten in the rush of the things which must be done by women.  It is as if we had all been bewitched and turned into somebody else.

“Well, I wish that Hilda could be turned into somebody else.  Into somebody as nice as—­Emily—.  But she won’t be.  She hasn’t been changed the least bit by the war, and everybody else has, even Alma, or she wouldn’t have said that about your being lucky to have me.  Are you lucky, Derry?