Of the boys they saw go, a few were killed; but they were boys whom she knew only by sight. Two of Josiah's sons went, and one died of influenza after he had been decorated three times; but this boy had lived away so long that she did not feel close to him. Bob Ellgood's second son returned a nervous wreck from shell shock, and whenever Dorinda saw him on the porch at Green Acres, trying to make baskets of straw, she would feel that her heart was melting in pity. But even then the war did not actually touch her. Her nearest approach to the fighting was when Fluvanna's son Jubal died in a French hospital, and she was obliged to read the later aloud because Fluvanna was too distressed to spell out the words. Dorinda had known Jubal from his babyhood. He had grows up on the farm, and she had taught him to read. The day the news came the two women worked until they were ready to drop from exhaustion. Work had always been Dorinda's salvation. It was saving her now from the war as it had once saved her from the memory of Jason. With the return of peace, she had hoped that the daily life on the farm would slip back into orderly grooves; but before the end of the first year she discovered that the demoralization of peace was more difficult to combat than the madness of war. There was no longer an ecstatic patriotism to inspire one to fabulous exploits. The world that had been organized for destruction appeared to her to become as completely disorganized for folly. Even at Pedlar's Mill there were ripples of the general disintegration. What was left now, she demanded moodily, of that hysterical war rapture, except an aversion from work and the high cost of everything? The excessive wages paid for unskilled labour were ruinous to the farmer; for the field hands who had earned six dollars a day from the Government were not satisfied to drive a plough for the small sum that had enabled her to reclaim the abandoned meadows of Five Oaks. One by one, she watched the fields of the tenant farmers drop back into broomsedge and sassafras. She was using two tractor-ploughs on the farm; but the roads were almost impassable again because none of the negroes could be persuaded to work on them. Even when she employed men to repair the strip of corduroy road between the bridge and the fork, it was impossible to keep the bad places firm enough for any car heavier than a Ford to travel over them. Yet these years, which she had believed would mean the end of her prosperity, passed over her also and were gone.