Two years after the McIvor episode the Mannering household had changed little outwardly. But young Eric had been now for a year a practising lawyer, with a beginning of a reputation already, and Honor, secretary to Henry Barron, president of the Empire Knitting Mills, was a capitalist. She had fifteen hundred dollars salted away in a savings-bank. “When it’s two thousand I’ll bolt for New York,” she told Barron, “and in six months from that I’ll be a success. You’ll see. Stroble says my voice is better and better.” About that time she awoke with a start to a huge movement in the world; the world was swaying on its foundations, and she in her self-centred little orbit suddenly was shaken. America was at war. On a day it came to her what war meant. It was Eric, chafing at his lameness, his helplessness to fight, Eric burning with patriotism, who roused her. The boy had developed into a speaker of promise, and was being used at a variety of meetings. One day an older speechmaker said to him: “Make them sing something before you begin. It limbers an audience and focusses its attention. It does your first five minutes’ work for you.” “Honor, do you want to go with me and sing at a factory meeting to-morrow at noon? I want a verse of ‘America’ to stir the meeting up before I speak.” “Why, yes,” the girl agreed easily. “I can get off. And it’s good advertisement. My voice will be known a bit.” “Young pig!” The brother apostrophized her. “Isn’t it in you to consider your flag?” Honor reflected. “I don’t think so,” she decided with honesty. “Lots of people are doing things for the flag. I’m glad to have ’em. Me, I’ve got my voice and my career; that’s all I can attend to. I’m like a horse, capable of only one idea at a time.” “Isn’t it in you,” interjected her father, unhurried, soft-voiced, “to consider your breeding? Your family traditions? A daughter of the Mannerings of Garden Court--singing to factory-hands! My word! the race is degenerating.” “Not at all, dad. It’s improving. Family traditions don’t cut any ice,” remarked Honor tersely. “If Eric and I bothered with them we’d get nowhere.” “For Eric it’s permissible,” Mannering stated. “It’s a statesmanlike accomplishment to make speeches. But you--entertaining workmen! Hideous! I suppose if I definitely objected it wouldn’t make any difference.” “Don’t definitely object, dear child,” Honor adjured her father. “You know you’re not fitted to handle Eric and me. But we do hate to go bang into your theories. So put ’em on a high shelf out of our reach, beautiful one. They don’t go with us at all, but they’re simply lovely on you.”