kew.

"Where you been, Tessie?"

"Oh, walkin'."

"Who with?"

"Cora."

"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago."

Tessie, taking the hatpins out of her hat on her way upstairs, met this
coolly. "Yeh, I ran into her comin' back."

Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her hard little bed, she stared up into
the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well, what's
the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' a fuss about
the soldiers: feedin' 'em, and askin' 'em to their houses, and sendin'
'em things, and givin' dances and picnics and parties so they wouldn't
be lonesome. Chuck had told her all about it. The other boys told the
same. They could just pick and choose their good times. Tessie's mind
groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about the girls? She
didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind, trained to
think. Easy enough to paw over the menfolks and get silly over brass
buttons and a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain
of a popular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?" Tessie,
smiling a crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the
words deftly: "What're you going to do to help the girls?" she demanded.
"What're you going to do--" She rolled over on one side and buried her
head in her arms.

* * * * *

There was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the
old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest
bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first.
But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world
about her. The Chippewa _Courier_ went into the newspaper pile behind
the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye.

She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted her
glass in her eye the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of
unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness.

"An' they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood
there, kind of quiet, lookin' straight ahead, and then all of a sudden
she ran to her pa--"

"Both comin' at once, like that--"

"I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She--"

Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about her
and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of this
picture? Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the s