ying. "That is a new idea to me. Here
they've been telling me for a year that there's no way but the slow
push, trench after trench--"

"Let me say to you," interrupted the Saxon lad.

"You will pardon me, if I finish what I am saying," went on Watts in
full tidal flow. "What was it I was saying? Oh, yes, I remember--that
slow hard push is not the only way, after all. You tell me--"

"That's the way it is all day long," explained the sister. "Chatter,
chatter, chatter. They are telling each other all they know. You would
think they would get fed up. But as fast as one of them says something,
that seems to be a new idea to the other. Mr. Watts acts like a man who
has been starved."

Watts caught sight of his friend.

"We've killed all the flies," he shouted.

WOMEN UNDER FIRE

This war has been a revelation of womanhood. To see one of these cool,
friendly creatures, American and English, shove her motor car into
shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless crippled men, and steam back to
safety, is to watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They may be,
they are, "ministering angels," but there is nothing meek in their
demeanor. They have stepped to a vantage from which nothing in man's
contemptuous philosophy will ever dislodge them. They have always
existed to astonish those who knew them best, and have turned life into
a surprise party from Eden to the era of forcible feeding. But assuredly
it would make the dogmatists on the essentially feminine nature, like
Kipling, rub their eyes, to watch modern women at work under fire. They
haven't the slightest fear of being killed. Give them a job under
bombardment, and they unfold the stretcher, place the pillow and tuck in
the blanket, without a quiver of apprehension. That, too, when some of
the men are scampering for cover, and ducking chance pellets from the
woolly white cloud that breaks overhead. The women will eat their
luncheon with relish within three hundred feet of a French battery in
full blaze. Is there a test left to the pride of man that the modern
woman does not take lightly and skilfully? Gone are the Victorian nerves
and the eighteenth-century fainting. All the old false delicacies have
been swamped. She has been held back like a hound from the hunting, till
we really believed we had a harmless household pet, who loved security.
We had forgotten the pioneer women who struck across frontiers with a
hardihood that matched that of their mates. And