"To look at Miss Webling, would you take her for a perfect nut? She is, though--the worst ever. Do you know what she has done? Taken up stenography and gone into the office of a ship-building gang!" The other squaws exclaimed upon her with various out-cries of amazement. "What's more," said Mamise, "I live on my salary." This was considered incredible in the Washington of then. Mamise admitted that it took management. Mamise said: "Polly, can you see me living in a shanty cooking my own breakfast and dinner and waiting on myself and washing my own dishes? And for lunch going to a big mess-hall, waiting on myself, too, and eating on the swollen arm of a big chair?" Polly shook her head in despair of her. "Let those do it that have to. Nobody's going to get me to live like a Belgian refugee without giving me the same excuse." Mamise suddenly felt that her heroism was hardly more than a silly affectation, a patriotic pose. In these surroundings the memory of her daily life was disgusting, plain stupidity. Here she was in her element, at her superlative. She breathed deeply of the atmosphere of luxury, the incense of rich food served ceremoniously to resplendent people. "I'm beginning to agree with you, Polly. I don't think I'll ever go back to honest work again." She thought she saw in Davidge's eyes a gleam of approval. It occurred to her that he was renewing his invitation to her to become his wife and live as a lady. She was not insulted by the surmise. When the women departed for the drawing-room, the men sat for a while, talking of the coal famine, the appalling debts the country was heaping into mountains--the blood-sweating taxes, the business end of the war, the prospect for the spring campaign on the Western Front, the avalanche of Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviki, the story that they were in German pay, the terrible toll of American lives it would take to replace the Russian armies, and the humiliating delay in getting men into uniform, equipped, and ferried across the sea. The astounding order had just been promulgated, shutting down all industry and business for four days and for the ten succeeding Mondays in order to eke out coal; this was regarded as worse than the loss of a great battle. Every aspect of the war was so depressing that the coroner's inquest broke up at once when Major Widdicombe said: "I get enough of this in the shop, and I'm frozen through. Let's go in and jaw the women." Concealing their loneliness, the men entered the drawing-room with the majestic languor of lions well fed.