snowy sheets.

She had forgotten to explain to Polly about her Baltimore venture, and
she shivered so vigorously that sleep was impossible to her palsied
bones. She grew no warmer from besetting visions of the battle-front.
She tried to shame herself out of her chill by contrasting her opulent
bed with the dreadful dugouts in France, the observation posts, the
shell-riddled ruins, where millions somehow existed. Again, as at
Valley Forge, American soldiers were marching there in the snow
barefooted, or in rags or in wooden sabots, for lack of ships to get
new shoes across.

Yet, in these frozen hells there were not men enough. The German
offensive must not find the lines so sparsely defended. Men must be
combed out of every cranny of the nations and herded to the slaughter.
America was denying herself warmth in order to build shells and to
shuttle the ships back and forth. There was need of more women,
too--thousands more to nurse the men, to run the canteens, to mend the
clothes, to warm men's hearts _via_ their stomachs, and to take their
minds off the madness of war a little while. The Salvation Army would
furnish them hot doughnuts in the trenches and heat up their courage.
Actors and actresses were playing at all the big cantonments now.
Later they would be going across to play in France--one-night stands,
two a day in Picardy.

Suddenly Mamise felt the need to go abroad. In a kind of burlesque of
the calling of the infant Samuel, she sat up in her bed, startled as
by a voice calling her to a mission. She had been an actress, a
wanderer, a performer in cheap theaters, a catcher of late trains, a
dweller in rickety hotels. She knew cold, and she had played half clad
in draughty halls.

She had escaped from the life and had tried to escape the memory of
it. But now that she was so cold she felt that nothing was so pitiful
as to be cold. She understood, with a congealing vividness, how those
poor droves of lads in bitterer cold were suffering, scattered along
the frontiers of war like infinite flocks of sheep caught in a
blizzard. She felt ashamed to be here shivering in this palatial
misery when she might be sharing the all-but-unbearable squalor of the
soldiers.

The more she recoiled from the hardships the more she felt the
impulse. It would be her atonement.

She would buy a trombone and retire into the wilderness to practise
it. She would lay her dignity, her aristocracy, her pride, on the
altar of sacri