the big vault was cold; the men shivered and marveled at the women,
who left their wraps on the backs of their chairs and sat up in no
apparent discomfort with shoulders, backs, chests, and arms naked to
the chill.

Polly was moved to explain to the great folk present just who Mamise
was. She celebrated Mamise in her own way.

"To look at Miss Webling, would you take her for a perfect nut? She
is, though--the worst ever. Do you know what she has done? Taken up
stenography and gone into the office of a ship-building gang!"

The other squaws exclaimed upon her with various out-cries of
amazement.

"What's more," said Mamise, "I live on my salary."

This was considered incredible in the Washington of then. Mamise
admitted that it took management.

Mamise said: "Polly, can you see me living in a shanty cooking my own
breakfast and dinner and waiting on myself and washing my own dishes?
And for lunch going to a big mess-hall, waiting on myself, too, and
eating on the swollen arm of a big chair?"

Polly shook her head in despair of her. "Let those do it that have
to. Nobody's going to get me to live like a Belgian refugee without
giving me the same excuse."

Mamise suddenly felt that her heroism was hardly more than a silly
affectation, a patriotic pose. In these surroundings the memory of her
daily life was disgusting, plain stupidity. Here she was in her
element, at her superlative. She breathed deeply of the atmosphere of
luxury, the incense of rich food served ceremoniously to resplendent
people.

"I'm beginning to agree with you, Polly. I don't think I'll ever go
back to honest work again."

She thought she saw in Davidge's eyes a gleam of approval. It occurred
to her that he was renewing his invitation to her to become his wife
and live as a lady. She was not insulted by the surmise.

When the women departed for the drawing-room, the men sat for a while,
talking of the coal famine, the appalling debts the country was
heaping into mountains--the blood-sweating taxes, the business end of
the war, the prospect for the spring campaign on the Western Front,
the avalanche of Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviki, the story that
they were in German pay, the terrible toll of American lives it would
take to replace the Russian armies, and the humiliating delay in
getting men into uniform, equipped, and ferried across the sea. The
astounding order had just been promulgated, shutting down all industry
and business for