She was in great doubt. Nobody, of course, would attach any significance to it, whichever she did, not even Hal, probably. It was only important to herself. She knew something had happened to her during the past year that was comparable to the change in Hal the year before. She had evidence now under her hands and in her eyes as she stood undressed, evidence that did not wholly please her, for she had lately taken a fancy to dislike women. More satisfactory evidence was a sense of mental growth. She had just returned from a long Spring vacation in New York with Mathilda, not her first visit but her most exciting one, and her thoughts were awhirl with Pavlova and Rachmaninoff and the Washington Square Players, bobbed hair and the operas at the Metropolitan, and a dozen startling, vivifying, even violent art exhibitions. She felt that she was probably much more splashed by the currents than Hal himself, for certainly one did not really learn anything at a boy’s school. Such places could only be high class stables for thoroughbred colts to pass the awkward stage in, under trainers far less capable than those they would have had if they were horses. And now the question was whether to test the glamour of these mental and physical acquisitions upon Hal by waiting to meet him alone, or to go like a good fellow and see him with the family. There was, of course, nothing personal about it; Hal was no more than an opportune judge. He represented the best criticism the East had to send back to them. After her bath she decided for action. She would go with the others and meet him. “Anyway, why attach so much importance to Hal? He’s quite capable of attaching enough to himself.” There was the possibility, too, of dramatic interest in his arrival. The year before, on his return, at eighteen, he had boldly announced to his father he was going to war. There wasn’t to be a day lost, he wanted to go at once. Every man in his class was going somehow or other. Sterling Blaydon opposed it, the argument dragged out for days, and finally the family won. But it was only with the understanding that if Hal would finish his last year at school he might make his own decision. The country’s participation in the war was now over a year old and the outlook was dismal, one German advance after another having succeeded. There were plenty of youngsters of nineteen and twenty in it, and Hal would insist upon enlisting. He had, as a matter of fact, and as his letters showed, done almost no schooling at Fanstock that year. The entire institution had been made over into a training camp. Moira remembered how her cousin had chafed the summer before, hating his idleness and the wretched fate of being in excessive demand to entertain girls. Her sympathy with his groans had gone a long way to help her forgive his ill treatment. And yet she had never been worked up to a pitch of great excitement about the war.