up in their brother's clothes, or
their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as
knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in
men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly
boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish
swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a
little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be
stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy."

Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink
upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the
music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and
chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands
on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they
giggled and shrieked and ran.

But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch
hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the
stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases
such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little
conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters
on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last
letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.

Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in
Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed
looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which
she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were
those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red
triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator.
They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere
in the East. These letters were not from him.

Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop
on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue
shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped,
veiled, aproned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft,
your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that
complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not
belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No
matter how grossly red the blood which the Gra