ten and twelve and fifteen bucks a week now—­Lawsee, man—­you ought to see ’em!  Dressed up to kill; fat, cheerful, wide-awake!  Goddlemighty, man, you wouldn’t know ’em for that same measly bunch of grouches we had three years ago.  And they work for the shop now, and not against it.  They’re different girls.  I wouldn’t-a believed ten dollars a week would-a turned the trick; but it’s sure done it.”

“Perhaps,” suggested his acquaintance, “the girls are cheerful and competent because they aren’t afraid of poverty.  Maybe they are motived by hope of getting on in the world and not motived by the terror of slipping down.  Does that not make them stand by the shop instead of working against it?  Isn’t it a developed middle class feeling that accepts the shop as ‘their kind of people’ now?”

“Search me, Cap—­I give it up.  I just only know what I know and see what I see.  And never again—­you hear me, man—­never again does our shop go back to men.  The ten or twelve dollar skirt has made a hit with me!  Have a cigarette?”

The net gain of women in this war, all over the world is, of course, a gain in fellowship.

But after all fellowship will be futile if it does not bear fruit.  And the first fruit of the fellowship between men and women in Europe surely will be a wider and deeper influence of women upon the destinies of the European world.  And who can doubt who knows woman, that her influence will be thrown first and heaviest toward a just and lasting peace.

Often while we were in London, during the last days of our stay, when the meaning of the war gradually was forming in our minds we talked of these things.  There are two Henrys—­one, the owner of a ten-story building in Wichita, the editor of a powerful and profitable newspaper; the other a protagonist, a sentimental idealist.  To me this was his greatest charm—­this infinite variety of Henrys that was forever turning up in our discourse.  The owner of the Beacon building and the publisher of the newspaper had small use for my theories about the importance of the rise of woman into fellowship with men in the new democratization of the world.  He refused to see the democratization of the world in the war.  To him the war meant adjustment of boundaries, economic advantages, and realignments of political and commercial influence on the map of the world.  But to the other Henry, to the crusader whom I had seen many times setting out on the quest for the grail in politics, throwing away his political fortunes for a cause and a creed as lightly as a man would toss aside a cigar stub, the war began to mean something more than its military expression.

And one night as we sat in our room waiting for dinner a letter came up from the Eager Soul, with some trinkets she had sent over to us by messenger to take to her mother in Denver.  After telling us the news of the hospital, and of Auntie and of the wound in the Young Doctor’s hand, she wrote: