equally plump envelopes with a red emblem in one corner.

You sent boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more
durable forms of cake.

Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California.

He was furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was
expressed in his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her
replies. She tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch
of terror in it, too. California! Might as well send a person to the
end of the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then,
inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New
York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it
turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a
cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is
as dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time
and I've traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats
me swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They
make Hatton's place look like a dump."

The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among
themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they
could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys
around.

They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the
type known as a stag. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced,
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.

But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch
hour and in the washroom, there was a little desultory talk about the
stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases
such as "I says to him"--and "He says to me." They wasted little
conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters
on blue-lined paper with the red emblem 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 New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an av