"Oh," I says, and I couldn't say another word till I managed to ask her if her son had been in the draft. "No," she said. "He volunteered April 7, 1917." It wasn't until I got out in the street that I remembered I hadn't thanked her for the roses at all. But there wasn't time to think of that. I headed straight for Mis' Silas Sykes. She looked awful bad, and I don't think probably she'd slept a wink all night. I ask' her casual how the reception was coming on, and she kind of began to cry. "I don't know what you hector me for like this," she says. "Ain't it enough that I've got to call folks up to-day and tell them I've made a fool of myself?" "Not yet," I says. "Not yet you ain't made one of yourself, Mis' Sykes. That's to come, if any. It is hard," I says, "to do the particular thing you'll have to do. There's them," I says crafty, "as'll gloat." "I thought about them all night long," she says, her breath showing through her words. "Then think no more, Mis' Sykes," I says, "because there's a reason over there in that house why we should go ahead with our plan--and it's a reason you can't get around." She looked at me, like one looking with no hope. And then I told her. I never saw a woman so checkered in her mind. Her head was all reversed, and where had been one notion, another bobbed up to take its place, and where the other one had been previous, a new one was dancing. "But do they do that?" she ask'. "Do they give war-crosses to _negroes_?" "Why not?" I says. "France don't care because the fore-fathers of these soldiers were made slaves by us. She don't lay it up against _them_. That don't touch their bravery. England never has minded dark skins--look at her East Indians and Egyptians that they say are everywhere in London. Nobody cares but us. Of course France gives negroes crosses of war when they're brave--why shouldn't she?" "My gracious," Mis' Sykes says, "but what'll folks say here if we do go ahead and recognize them?" "Recognize _him_!" I cried. "Mis' Sykes--are you going to let him offer up his life, and go over to Europe and have his bravery recognized there, and then come back here and get the cold shoulder from you--are you? Then shame on us all!" I says. Then Mis' Sykes said the things folks always say: "But if we recognize them, what about marriage?" "See here," says I, "there's thousands and thousands of tuberculosis cases in this country to-day. And more hundreds of thousands with other diseases. Do we set the whole lot of them apart, and refuse to be decent to them, or do business with them, because they ought not to marry our girls and boys? Don't you see how that argument is just an excuse?" "All the same," said Mis' Sykes, "it might happen." "Then make a law against inter-marriage," I says. "That's easy. Nothing comes handier than making a new law. But don't snub the whole race--especially those that have risked their lives for you, Mis' Sykes!" She stared at me, her face looking all triangular.