“I can always send the car for you, Jean,” her father said.  “I don’t care to have you out alone.”

“Having the car isn’t like walking.  You know it isn’t, Daddy, with the rain against your cheeks and the wind—­”

Dr. McKenzie’s quick imagination was fired.  His eyes were like Jean’s, lighted from within.

“I suppose it is all right if she comes straight up Connecticut Avenue, Hilda?”

Miss Merritt had long white hands which lay rather limply on the table.  Her arms were bare.  She was handsome in a red-cheeked, blond fashion.

“Of course if you think it is all right, Doctor—­”

“It is up to Jean.  If she isn’t afraid, we needn’t worry.”

“I’m not afraid of anything.”

He smiled at her.  She was so pretty and slim and feminine in her white gown, with a string of pearls on her white neck.  He liked pretty things and he liked her fearlessness.  He had never been afraid.  It pleased him that his daughter should share his courage.

“Perhaps, if I am not too busy, I will come for you the next time you go to the shop.  Would walking with me break the spell of the wind and wet?”

“You know it wouldn’t.  It would be quite—­heavenly—­Daddy.”

After dinner, Doctor McKenzie read the evening paper.  Jean sat on the rug in front of the fire and knitted for the soldiers.  She had made sweaters until it seemed sometimes as if she saw life through a haze of olive-drab.

“I am going to knit socks next,” she told her father.

He looked up from his paper.  “Did you ever stop to think what it means to a man over there when a woman says ’I’m going to knit socks’?”

Jean nodded.  That was one of the charms which her father had for her.  He saw things.  It was tired soldiers at this moment, marching in the cold and needing—­socks.

Hilda, having no vision, remarked from the corner where she sat with her book, “There’s no sense in all this killing—­I wish we’d kept out of it.”

“Wasn’t there any sense,” said little Jean from the hearth rug, “in Bunker Hill and Valley Forge?”

Hilda evaded that.  “Anyhow, I’m glad they’ve stopped playing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ at the movies.  I’m tired of standing up.”

Jean voiced her scorn.  “I’d stand until I dropped, rather than miss a note of it.”

Doctor McKenzie interposed: 

  “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
  ’To talk of many things,
  Of shoes—­and ships—­and sealing wax—­
  Of cabbages—­and kings—­’”

“Oh, Daddy,” Jean reproached him, “I should think you might be serious.”

“I am not just twenty—­and I have learned to bank my fires.  And you mustn’t take Hilda too literally.  She doesn’t mean all that she says, do you, Hilda?”

He patted Miss Merritt on the shoulder as he went out.  Jean hated that.  And Hilda’s blush.

With the Doctor gone, Hilda shut herself up in the office to balance her books.