one walking home with you. What if he was
old enough to be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movie
heroes had graying hair at the sides.

They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had once
heard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk." When she
entered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyes
were brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked up
quickly, peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, very
much askew.

"Where you been, Tessie?"

"Oh, walkin'."

"Who with?"

"Cora."

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

Tessie, taking off 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--feeding 'em, and asking 'em to their houses,
and sending 'em things, and giving 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.
Easy enough to paw over the men-folks 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.

"And they say she ne