popularly supposed to be killing time with ingenious wickedness worked
as hard as the average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantes
newly burst upon the world had, for the most part, banded themselves
together as a junior war-relief society and were turning out weekly an
immense number of bandages for the wounded soldiers of France and
England. Young men of high and gallant spirit, who bore the old names
of New York, had disappeared without a line of publicity--to be heard
of later as members of the already famous Escadrille or as ambulance
workers on the Western front. Beautiful girls had slipped quietly away
from their usual haunts, touched by a deep and rare emotion, to work in
Allied hospitals three thousand miles and more away--if not as
full-blown nurses, then as scullery maids or motor drivers.

There were, of course, the Oldershaws and the Marie Littlejohns and the
Christine Hurleys and the rest. Alice had met and watched them throwing
themselves against any bright light like all silly moths. And there
were the girls like Joan, newly released from the exotic atmosphere of
those fashionable finishing schools which no sane country should
permit. But even these wild and unbroken colts and fillies, she
believed, had excuses. They were the natural results of a complete lack
of parental discipline and school training. They ran amuck, advertised
by the press and applauded by the hawks who pounced upon their wallets.
They were more to be pitied than condemned, far more foolish and
ridiculous than decadent. They were not unique, either, or peculiar to
their own country. Every nation possessed its "smart set," its little
group of men and women who were ripe for the lunatic asylum, and even
the war and its iron tonic had failed to shock them into sanity. In her
particularly sane way of looking at things, Alice saw all this, was
proud to know that the majority of the people who formed American
society were fine and sound and generous, and kept as much as possible
out of the way of those others whose one object in life was to outrage
the conventions. It was only when people began to tell her of seeing
her husband and her friend about together night after night that she
found herself wondering, with jealousy in her heart, how long her
optimism would endure, because Gilbert had already shown her a foot of
clay, and Joan was deliberately flying wild.

It was, at any rate, all to the good that Joan kept her promise an