“Oh, I want the war to end—­I want Derry, and sunshine and well people.  It seems a hundred years since I did anything just for the fun of doing it.  It seems a million years since Daddy and I drove downtown together and drank chocolate sodas—­

“But then nobody is drinking chocolate sodas—­at least no one is doing it light-heartedly.  You can’t be light-hearted when the person you love best in the world is going to war.  You can be brave, and you can make your lips laugh, but you can’t make your heart laugh—­you can’t—­you can’t—.

“I talk a great deal to the women who come to Emily’s Toy Shop.  And I am finding out that some of those that seem fluffy-minded are really very much in earnest.  There is one little blonde, who always wears white silk and chiffon, she looks as if she had just stepped from the stage.  And at first I simply scorned her.  I felt that she would be the kind to leave ravellings in her wipes, and things like that.  But she doesn’t leave a ravelling.  She works slowly, but she does her work well—.  But now and then her hands tremble and the tears fall; and the other day I went and sat down beside her and I found out that her husband is flying in France, and that her two brothers are at the front—.  And one of them is among the missing; he may be a prisoner and he may be dead—.  And she is trying to do her bit and be brave.  And now I don’t care if she does wear her earlocks outside of her veil and load her hands with diamonds—­she’s a dear—–­and a darling.  But she’s scared just as I am—­and as Mary Connolly is, and as all the women are, though they don’t show it—.  I wonder if Joan of Arc was afraid—­in her heart as the rest of us are?  Perhaps she wasn’t, because she was in the thick of it herself, and we aren’t.  Perhaps if we were where we could see it and have the excitement of it all, we should lose our fear.

“But when women tell me that the women have the worst of it—­that they must sit at home and weep and wait, I don’t believe it.  We suffer—­of course, and there’s the thought of it all like a bad dream, and when we love our loved ones—­it is heartbreak.  But the men suffer, daily, in all the little things.  The thirst and the vermin, and the cold and wet—­and the noise—­and the frightfulness.  And they grow tired and hungry and homesick,—­and death is on every side of them, and horror—.  Some of the women who come to the shop sentimentalize a lot.  One woman recited, ’Break, break, break—­, the other day, and the rest of them cried into the gauze, cried for themselves, if you please; ’For men must work and women must weep.’  And then my little blonde told them what she thought of them.  Her name is ‘Maisie,’ wouldn’t you know a girl like that would be called ‘Maisie’?