put upon them like
a garment that morning for a uniform, and they walked in the shadow of
the great sadness that had come upon the world. She understood that
perhaps even up to the very day before, they had most of them been merry,
careless boys; but now they were men, made so in a night by the horrible
_sin_ that had brought about this thing called War.

For the first time since the war began Ruth Macdonald had a vision of
what the war meant. She had been knitting, of course, with all the rest;
she had spent long mornings at the Red Cross rooms--she was on her way
there this very minute when Michael and the procession had interrupted
her course--she had made miles of surgical dressings and picked tons of
oakum. She had bade her men friends cheery good-byes when they went to
Officers' Training Camps, and with the other girls welcomed and admired
their uniforms when they came home on short furloughs, one by one winning
his stripes and commission. They were all men whom she had known in
society. They had wealth and position and found it easy to get into the
kind of thing that pleased them in the army or navy. The danger they were
facing seemed hardly a negligible quantity. It was the fashion to look on
it that way. Ruth had never thought about it before. She had even been
severe in her judgment of a few mothers who worried about their sons and
wanted to get them exempt in some way. But these stern loyal mothers who
stood in close ranks with heavy lines of sacrifice upon their faces,
tears on their cheeks, love and self-abnegation in their eyes, gave her a
new view of the world. These were the ones who would be in actual
poverty, some of them, without their boys, and whose lives would be empty
indeed when they went forth. Ruth Macdonald had never before realized the
suffering this war was causing individuals until she saw the faces of
those women with their sons and brothers and lovers; until she saw the
faces of the brave boys, for the moment all the rollicking lightness
gone, and only the pain of parting and the mists of the unknown future in
their eyes.

It came to the girl with a sudden pang that she was left out of all this.
That really it made little difference to her whether America was in the
war or not. Her life would go on just the same--a pleasant monotony of
bustle and amusement. There would be the same round of social affairs and
regular engagements, spiced with the excitement of war work and
occasional visit