u to get to be all the things he said you would. For every line he was
talking up there, I could see my boy coming home to me some day better than
anything I could make out of him, babying him the way I can't help doing. I
could see you, honey-bee, coming back to me with the kind of lift to your
head a fellow has when he's been fighting to make the world a safe place
for dem--for whatever it was he said. I want you to go, Jimmie. I want you
to beat the draft, too. Nothing on earth can make me not want you to go."

"Why, Gert--you're kiddin'!"

"Honey, you want to go, don't you? You want to square up those shoulders
and put on khaki, don't you? Tell me you want to go!"

"Why--why, yes, Gert, if--"

"Oh, you're going, Jimmie! You're going!"

"Why, girl--you're crazy! Our flat! Our furniture--our--"

"What's a flat? What's furniture? What's anything? There's not a firm in
business wouldn't take back a boy's furniture--a boy's everything--that's
going out to fight for--for dem-o-cracy! What's a flat? What's anything?"

He let drop his head to hide his eyes.

Do you know it is said that on the Desert of Sahara, the slope of Sorrento,
and the marble of Fifth Avenue the sun can shine whitest? There is an
iridescence to its glittering on bleached sand, blue bay, and Carrara
facade that is sheer light distilled to its utmost.

On one such day when, standing on the high slope of Fifth Avenue where it
rises toward the Park, and looking down on it, surging to and fro, it was
as if, so manifest the brilliancy, every head wore a tin helmet, parrying
sunlight at a thousand angles of refraction.

Parade-days, all this glittering midstream is swept to the clean sheen of
a strip of moire, this splendid desolation blocked on each side by crowds
half the density of the sidewalk.

On one of these sun-drenched Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition to
this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of
music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene
thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after
impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will,
but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great
primordial mire of war.

There is no state of being so finely sensitized as national consciousness.
A gauntlet down and it surges up. One ripple of a flag defended can
goose-flesh a nation. How bitter and how sweet it i