cket-collector at Reading said: "I can't punch your
ticket. Don't you see I'm eating an apple!"

One of the reactions of the wider functioning of brain and muscle which
struck me most forcibly was the increased joyfulness of women. They were
happy in their work, happy in the thought of rendering service, so happy
that the poignancy of individual loss was carried more easily.

This cheerfulness is somewhat gruesomely voiced in a cartoon in _Punch_
touching on the allowance given to the soldier's wife. She remarks,
"This war is 'eaven--twenty-five shillings a week and no 'usband
bothering about!" We have always credited _Punch_ with knowing England.
Truth stands revealed by a thrust, however cynical, when softened by
challenging humor.

There was no discipline in the pension system. No work was required. The
case of a girl I met in a country town was common. She was working in a
factory earning eleven shillings a week. A day or two later I saw her,
and she told me she had stopped work, as she had "married a soldier, and
'e's gone to France, and I get twelve and six separation allowance a
week." Never did the strange English name, "separation allowance," seem
more appropriate for the wife's pension than in this girl's story.
Little wonder was it that in the early months of the war there was some
riotous living among soldiers' wives!

And the comments of women of influence on the drunkenness and waste of
money on foolish finery were as striking to me as the sordid condition
itself. The woman chairman of a Board of Poor Law Guardians in the north
of England told me that when her fellow-members suggested that
Parliament ought to appoint committees to disburse the separation
allowances, she opposed them with the heroic philosophy that women can
be trained in wisdom only by freedom to err, that a sense of
responsibility had never been cultivated in them, and the country would
have to bear the consequences. In reply to my inquiry as to how the
Guardians received these theories, I learned that "they knew she was
right and dropped their plan."

The faith of leading women that experience would be the best teacher for
the soldier's wife has been justified. A labor leader in the Midlands
told me that an investigation by his trade union showed that only one
hundred women in the ten thousand cases inquired into were mis-spending
their allowances. And when I was visiting a board school in a poor
district of London, and remarked to