“Yes,” said Jane.
Again there was silence. Again it was Agnes who broke it. And this time with a gallant attempt at a cheerful smile.
“I haven’t thanked you, Jane, for all you did for Jimmy last winter. He simply loved Chicago. He was awfully happy there. He wrote me the gayest letters.”
“I’m glad he did,” said Jane.
“He was happy in his work and happy about the concerto. He seemed so young, Jane, and somehow carefree—just the way he did when I first knew him. He wrote me very often—and always such funny letters.”
“No one could be as funny as Jimmy,” said Jane.
“No,” said Agnes. “He was always funny when he was happy. Do you know, Jane, I’ve always understood why he didn’t come back to me? I understood it even at the time. The strongest thing in Jimmy’s life was his sense of adventure. I think those months in Chicago must have seemed rather adventurous, after the years with me and little Agnes in this flat. That seems absurd to you and me, of course, for to us Chicago is just the town we grew up in—but to Jimmy I think it must have been rather a castle in Spain. He couldn’t come back to humble domesticity just after it. He had to wander. To look for other castles, you know, in other countries. But he would have come back, Jane—” Her voice trailed off a trifle wistfully.
“Of course he would have!” said Jane warmly.
“The thing that kills me,” said Agnes soberly, “is that if he had, you know, our life might have been quite different. My play’s doing awfully well, Jane. They’re going to start a second company on the road. I’m going to take a chance, Jane, and resign from Macy’s to write another. I think—I think that perhaps I can really make a lot of money. Enough to have changed everything for Jimmy—”
“Agnes,” said Jane solemnly, “you’re perfectly wonderful.”
“No, I’m not,” said Agnes. “I’m just a worker.”
“You’re always right,” said Jane.
“But not wonderful,” smiled Agnes. “Jimmy was wonderful. And always wrong. Oh, Jane!” Agnes’s smile was very tremulous. “Wouldn’t you know that Jimmy would fight with the Germans and die a hero’s death on the wrong side of the Marne? Jimmy was on the wrong side of every Marne from the day he was born!”
“But always wonderful,” smiled Jane. “And always the hero.”
“To me,” said Agnes gently.
“To me, too,” said Jane.
Part IV
Cicily, Jenny, and Steve
I
I
“Karo,” said Isabel, “is just as good as sugar. In case you can’t tell the difference.”
The morning sunshine was slanting in the wide dusty windows of the Chicago skyscraper. The big bare room was hung with Red Cross posters and filled with long deal tables and crowded with smartly dressed women. They sat, uncomfortably, on caterer’s folding chairs around the tables, meticulously pressing small squares of cheesecloth into intricately mitred rectangles. Isabel was working the bandage roller at the head of the first table. Muriel, at her elbow, looked up from her gauze sponges.
“But is it fattening?” she asked.
“Everything good is fattening,” said Isabel with a little sigh of resignation.
Jane smiled as she heard her. She knew that Isabel, at forty-six, did not really care much any longer if everything good was. But Muriel, at forty-one, still cared a great deal. She was constantly repressing a slightly Semitic tendency toward rounded curves. She was still awfully pretty, Jane thought. Her blue eye had never lost that trick of dancing. They were dancing now, as she responded lightly:
“The women of this country have done a great deal for Herbert Hoover. I think the least he can do for them is to offer a few reducing food substitutes.”
Isabel did not join in the laugh that went round the table Jane knew that Isabel seriously deplored Muriel’s tendency to be frivolous about the war. Jack had been nine months in training now at Camp Brant in Rockford. Albert was there, too, of course. The boys had left Harvard together as soon as war was declared and had joined the first R.O.T.C. at Fort Sheridan. They would undoubtedly be shipped to France before the summer was over.
Isabel and Robin took the war very seriously. They were terribly worried about Jack. As far as they were concerned, it was just Jack’s war. Though he was still safely detailed to shoot machine guns over an Illinois prairie, Jane knew that Isabel was always thinking of him lying dead or wounded on a French battlefield. Every bandage she was rolling that morning in the big bare room on top of the Chicago skyscraper was turned out with a sense of personal service for her son.
Muriel was worried about Albert, too, of course. But she took a vicarious pride in his military exploits. She loved to have him gracing her Chicago drawing-room on his brief leaves from Camp Brant, looking decorative and dedicated and dapper in his second Lieutenant’s uniform. Albert Lancaster was a very beautiful young man and he was very fond of his mother. In the presence of Muriel’s other beautiful young men he always flirted with her, very flatteringly. Jane had sometimes felt that Muriel was just a little in love with him. She had said as much one day to Isabel at their mother’s luncheon-table.
“Now, Jane,” Isabel had responded airily, “don’t suggest that Muriel is going to add incest to her list of crimes!”
Mrs. Ward had said they should not talk like that. With Bert in the helpless condition he was, it was very natural for Muriel to centre her affections on her only son.
“If she only did!” had been Isabel’s telling comment.
Muriel had been
