way. But I have been thinking, oh, for a long time, even before you began to say it was your duty to go back into the ambulance work in France and not claim exemption because of your eyes, that I had no real right to give up my Red Cross work and be married and take things easily, before this terrible[31] war was ended. You and I, who have lived and worked in France since this war began know only too well how weary, how almost utterly exhausted by their long strain, the French now are. Why, sometimes I believe if our country had not entered the war just when she did—but then I must not speak of failure. For after all, nothing can stop the progress of evolution, no weariness, no mistakes, and evolution is what this war for democracy means. Still, that does not give any one of us the right to be a slacker, and that is the way I have been feeling lately.”

[31]

After this speech Richard Thornton gazed at his wife, not only with amazement, but with actual disfavor.

“Barbara,” he demanded, “isn’t being married and having a baby and doing what you can to help with the Red Cross work here and giving all the money we can possible afford sufficient to content you? I did not suppose you would allow even the war to change you into one of the sentimental women who neglect their own duties to take up with outside ones because they[32] are more interesting, more exciting, perhaps, than their own responsibilities.”

[32]

Barbara was silent an instant. Then she answered slowly, as if she were thinking quietly concerning her husband’s statement:

“Yes, Dick, but you also are married and also have a baby and also are doing what you can to help with the Red Cross work and giving all and more than you can afford to the war work! Yet you are not content to let the other fellows do the fighting. Why, you have been trying to enlist ever since the United States entered the war and have been terribly discouraged because you were found to be not up to the physical standard.”

Barbara now slipped down from the arm of her husband’s chair and took a low one of her own. In her dressing gown, with her braids hanging over her shoulders and her chin resting thoughtfully in her hand, she sat apparently deep in thought.

“You know it is a funny thing to me, Dick, why in this world there are in so many cases two rules of conduct, one for a woman and another for a man. I know, of course,[33] that war has always 

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