The second evening Aunt Win took them down to a Red Cross Bazaar at her club rooms. Jean enjoyed it in a way, although after the open air life and the quiet up home, overcrowded, steam-heated rooms oppressed her. She listened to a famous tenor sing something very fiery in French, and heard a blind Scotch soldier tell simply of the comfort the Red Cross supplies had brought to the little wayside makeshift hospital he had been taken to, an old mill inhabited only by owls and martins until the soldiers had come to it. Then a tiny little girl in pink had danced and the blind soldier put her on his shoulder afterwards while she held out his cap. It was filled with green bills, Jean saw, as they passed. Then a young American artist, her face aglow with enthusiasm, stood on the platform with two little French orphans, a boy and girl. And she told of how the girl students had been the first to start the godmother movement, to mother these waifs of war. “Wonderful, isn’t it, the work we’re doing?” said Aunt Win briskly, when it was over and they were in her limousine, bound uptown. “Doesn’t it inspire you, Jean?” “Not one single bit,” Jean replied fervently. “I think war is awful, and I don’t believe in it. Up home we’ve made a truce not to argue about it, because none of us agree at all.” “Well, child, I don’t believe in it either, but if the boys will get into these fights, it always has fallen to us women and always will, to bind up the wounds and patch them up the best we can. They’re a troublesome lot, but we couldn’t get along without them as I tell Mr. Everden.” “That sounds just like Cousin Roxy,” Jean said, and then she had to tell all about who Cousin Roxy was, and her philosophy and good cheer that had spread out over Gilead land from Maple Lawn. Better than the bazaar, she had liked the little supper at the Valleé’s studio. Mrs. Crane had found a costume for her to wear, a white silk mandarin coat with an under petticoat of heavy peach blossom embroidery, and Bab had fixed her dark hair in quaint Manchu style with two big white chrysanthemums, one over each ear. Bab was a Breton fisher girl in a dark blue skirt and heavy linen smock, with a scarlet cap on her head, and her blonde hair in two long heavy plaits. The studio was in the West Forties, over near Third Avenue. The lower floor had been a garage, but the Valleé’s took possession of it, and it looked like some old Florentine hall in dark oak, with dull red velvet tapestry rugs and hangings. A tall, thin boy squatted comfortably on top of a chest across one corner, and played a Hawaiian ukulele. It was the first time Jean had heard such music, and it made her vaguely homesick. “It always finds the place in your heart that hurts and wakes it up,” Bab told her. “That’s Piper Pearson playing. You remember the Pearsons at the Cove, Talbot and the rest? We call him Piper because he’s always our maker of sounds when anything’s doing.”