Here, on the other hand, was a people who saw everything from a long way off. For nearly three years their souls had been sickened with the tale of blood. Gilead might abide beyond Jordan and Asher in his ports, but no atrocious detail had been spared them. They knew, therefore, just what they were doing, exactly what was before them. I can hardly say that they made their choice; they grew toward it. They grew toward it calmly, deliberately, clear-sightedly; and for this very reason with an incomparable bravery. If I were an American citizen instead of the American citizen’s blood-brother, I might not say this; I might not have been aware of it. In any family the outsider can see that which escapes the observation of the daughter or the son. I heard no born American comment on this splendid, tranquil, leisurely readjustment of the spirit to a new, herculean task; perhaps no born American noticed it; but to me as an onlooker, interested and yet detached, it was one of the most grandiose movements of an epoch in which the repetition of the grandiose bewilders the sense of proportion, as on the first days in the Selkirks or the Alps. It was at this time I heard that Regina was addressing meetings. They were women’s club meetings, and I learned from Annette that she was speaking with success. “She seems to have come out of a sort of trance,” Annette observed of her, using the word I had used myself. “Ever since she came home she’s been like a girl walking in her sleep. Now she’s waked and is like her old self.” Since Annette knew my story, or part of it, I thought it no harm to ask, “To what do you attribute it?” But Annette refused to lend herself to my game. “I attribute it to her getting over the long strain. It’s natural that you people who’ve been over there should be dazed or jumpy or something. She’s been dazed.” “And what do you think I’ve been?” “Oh, you’ve been the same,” she laughed; “but then, you’re always queer.” _CHAPTER XXIX_ The news with regard to Regina acted on me as a twofold stimulus. In the first place, it sent me back at last to the Down and Out. If she had waked, I, too, would wake; and since she was actively pleading the great cause, I would do the same. I didn’t go to a meeting, but dropped in during a forenoon. The house was even humbler and dingier than I remembered it, but as scrupulously neat and clean. In the back sitting-room were half a dozen men, all of the type to which I had once belonged and with whom I felt a sympathy so overwhelming as to surprise myself. Perhaps because I had seen so much of what could be made of human material even when it was destined to be no more than cannon fodder in the end, I was sorry to see this waste.