“Possibly she is not working so hard now.” “Yes, she said she had only been to the club once in the last month, and you know how she loves to dance. She is sick of filing cards, poor kid. She is weary of her position. She is much too beautiful to be kept indoors. She would be able to live in the sunshine. It must be hard when one’s friends are all able to take life so easily. Of course, the girls are all working now for the Government, but there’s a difference between working for patriotism and for a living.” “Working for a living has its virtues; it’s broadening, and she will learn things that are not taught at home.” “But she has that unconquerable yearning for life and its activities.” “That’s all the better. She will learn to appreciate the advantages when they come to her, and she probably will never make the mistake of allowing her life to narrow down to one of domesticity, as so many young people do. If they could only learn that just as a landscape without a perspective is flat, so is a young life which has no outside interests to bring into relief the monotony of its daily tasks! Without a background of knowledge for comparison the unusual in life is flat and meaningless.” * * * * * Betty sat on the edge of her little white bed. It stood in a room simply furnished, and its whitish cast made a fitting background for her slight figure clothed in black with a plain white frill at the neck. Her eyes were slowly following the lines of a letter, which ran: “DEAR BETTY: “I send you roses to remind you that there is still much that is beautiful in the world--flowers and hills and sky, and nearer than these, home and family and friends. And there is much work to be done, work full worthy of your best, which just now you feel like giving to memory only; and there are so many lives to which your life may contribute something of what your mother gave to you. “It is one of my abiding faiths that life must be forward-looking and onward-pressing, not with forgetfulness of those who have gone, but with strength and even happiness in the knowledge that we carry on their work and that they do not die; that through us, and through our children and friends, and all to whom we pass on something of what we received from them, they are borne on to everlasting life. “For the moment we feel only the great loss--and today I feel as if something had gone from my life because so much has gone from yours--but sad as the moment is, it should also be one of the greatest moments of life; for from it should arise, purified from everything earthly, an ideal which may be as a torch to light the way. Thus among the most beautiful things still in the world are the spirits of those who have gone. “With love, “WALTER.”