But there was the pain at your heart that made you keep on thinking. Thinking, in spite of Stephen, whom you loved, and the children, whom you adored, and all the little practical things you had to do every day, like folding sponges for the Red Cross.
Why couldn’t she feel the war more keenly? With the maps still hung on the living-room wall and Stephen immersed in Liberty Loan campaigns, and Jack and Albert always about the house on their leaves from Camp Brant, and Cicily and Jenny and Isabel’s little Belle out every day in Red Cross uniforms, feeding hot dogs and coffee to the entrained doughboys at the canteens in the city switchyards?
They felt the war keenly enough—Cicily and Jenny and little Belle. They were all eager to go to France with the boys from Camp Brant. Cicily wanted to drive an ambulance. Underage, thank Heaven! She and Stephen would not have to face that problem. Uncle Sam, a less yielding relation than two indulgent parents, could be relied upon to keep the girls at home. Yes, ignoble but consoling thought, with little Steve still only fourteen the war could not touch her immediate family.
Isabel was talking of Crisco, now. She was saying it could never take the place of butter.
Jane rose from her seat abruptly. She had promised to meet Cicily at Marshall Field’s at noon. They were going to look for a new evening gown. Jack and Albert were coming down for the next weekend. Cicily and Belle were planning a party.
II
“But you’re children,” said Stephen.
“Oh, Dad,” said Cicily, with a tolerant smile, “be your age!”
Jane looked from Stephen to her twinkling daughter. Stephen was sitting in his armchair in the Lakewood living-room. The Evening Post, which had fallen from his hands a moment before at Cicily’s astounding announcement, lay on the floor at his feet. He was gazing at Cicily with an expression of mingled incredulity and consternation.
Cicily, her hand thrust casually through Jack Bridges’s arm, was standing on the hearthrug. She looked very cool and a little amused and not at all disheartened. She looked, indeed, just as she always did, like a yellow dandelion, with her tempestuous bobbed head of golden excelsior. The severity of her khaki uniform with its Red Cross insignia enhanced her flower-like charm. It was the common clay from which the flower had sprung. She looked as fresh as a dandelion, and as indifferent and as irresponsible. Jack Bridges was in khaki, too, with the crossed rifles of the infantryman on his collar and the gold bar of the second Lieutenant on his shoulders. He had come down yesterday for that weekend’s leave from Camp Brant at Rockford. He had just learned that he was sailing for France in six weeks, with the Eighty-Sixth Division.
Jack did not look at all disheartened, either, but not quite as cool as Cicily, nor nearly as indifferent nor as much amused. He looked just like Robin, Jane thought, with his pleasant snub-nosed smile and his friendly pale blue eyes. He was glancing at Stephen a trifle apologetically, but with no lack of self-confidence.
“How could I not have seen this was coming?” thought Jane.
“We’re not children, Dad,” continued Cicily with a pleasant smile. “I was nineteen in February and Jack will be twenty-two in July. We’re both well out of the perambulator!”
“I know just how you feel, sir,” said Jack sympathetically, “and I dare say, in a way, you’re right. If it weren’t for the war, I don’t suppose we would be getting married. If it weren’t for the war I’d be going to Tech all next winter and Cicily would be buzzing about the tea-fights at home. Still, she’d soon be marrying someone else, you know. I’d never have had the nerve to ask a girl like Cicily to wait for me. If it weren’t for the war, I’d be just an also-ran!”
“Wasn’t fought in vain, was it, Jacky?” said Cicily, pinching his elbow.
He kissed her pink cheek, very coolly, under her parents’ startled eyes.
“I wouldn’t expect to keep Cicily waiting at the church very long, even in wartime,” said Jack—Jane caught the note of humility behind his levity—“so we thought—”
“Jack!” said Cicily. “Don’t put it like that! We don’t think—we know! We’re going to get married, Dad, on the last day of June and have a two weeks’ honeymoon before he sails for France.”
“Cicily,” said Jane, “you’re much too young. You haven’t had any experience. You can’t know your own mind. The war has been fearfully upsetting, I know, for your generation. But you’re still a child. Oh—I know you’ve been home a year from Rosemary! But what sort of a year has it been? Just war work—and Jack. Not even a proper début. He was here every evening last summer when he was at Fort Sheridan in the R.O.T.C. And since he went to Rockford you’ve been getting letters and motoring up to see him and planning to get him down here on leave! You’ve never looked at another man—” Why hadn’t she seen this was coming? It was all so terribly clear in retrospect.
“You can’t get married,” said Stephen firmly, “before Jack goes to France.”
“You married Mumsy,” said Cicily sweetly, “before you went to Cuba.”
“That was very different,” said Jane.
“Why was it different?” said Cicily.
“Because your father was twenty-nine years old,” said Jane decidedly, “and I was twenty-one and I’d been home from college for two years and I’d known lots of men and—”
“Well, I bet if you’d wanted to marry the first man you looked at you’d have done it!” said Cicily.
A sudden flood of memories swept over Jane. Her
