"But when it’s the hardest test that ever comes to anyone in the world!" "Why, then, it’s pluck again, and still more pluck. It _is_ the hardest test that ever comes to anyone in the world. It’s harder than when women hear their boys are missing, and never know what becomes of them; and that’s pretty hard. But, Jennie, hard things are the making of us, and if we come through the hardest test in the world and still keep our kindlier feelings and our common sense, why, then, we come out pretty strong, don’t we?" Jennie said no more. She liked to have him talk to them in this way. It took for granted that they were worth talking to, and to become worth talking to had been a secret aim since the day when she first learned the value of pictures and books. A good many times she had stolen in to confer with the genial custodian at the Metropolitan; a good many volumes she had hidden in her room to study after she went to bed. She had proved to herself that she had a mind; and now Bob was hinting at unknown resources of strength. It nerved her; it put new heart in her. Having always been taught to consider herself weak, the suggestion that she could come through her test victoriously—that she could help him and Gussie and Gladys and Teddy and her mother to do the same—thrilled her like a sudden revelation. To Bob himself the theme was not a new one, though it was the first time he had ever got any of it into words. He had been mulling over it and round it ever since the war first called him from a state of mental lethargy. Needing then a clew to life, he had cast about him without finding one. Neither Groton nor Harvard had ever given him anything he could seize. His parents hadn’t given him anything, nor had their religion. Mentally, he had gone to France much as a jellyfish puts to sea, to be tossed about without volition of its own, and get its support from the food that drifts its way. Nothing much had drifted his way till he found himself in the hospital. There, in the long, empty days and sleepless nights, the "why" of things played in and out of his brain like a devil’s tattoo. He hated to think that all he had witnessed was futility and waste, and yet no explanation that anyone gave him made it seem otherwise. The question of suffering was the one that most perplexed him. What was the good of it? Why had it to be? Even the agony of his slashed head and crushed foot was almost beyond bearing; and what was that in comparison with all the pain, physical and emotional, at that minute in the world? What was the idea? How did it get you anywhere? In as far as he received an answer, it came one night when he waked from a light doze. He waked repeating certain words which he recognized as vaguely familiar: "_Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ._" He said them over two or three times before getting their significance.