It was Lottie Payson's last August of that sort. When next August came round there she was folding gauze, rolling bandages, stitching pneumonia jackets with the rest of them at the Michigan Avenue Red Cross shop and thinking to herself that the conversation of the women busy about the long tables or at the machines was startlingly like that of the old Reading Club. The Reading Club was, in fact, there almost in its entirety. The Girls' faces, framed in the white linen folds of their Red Cross coifs, looked strangely purified and aloof. Beck Schaefer alone wore her cap with a certain diablerie. She was captain of her section and her official coif was scarlet. She looked like Carmen strayed into a nunnery. A strange new spirit had come upon Chicago that summer. People talked high, and worked hard, prayed a good deal, gave their money away liberally and did not go to northern Michigan to escape the heat. Lottie sewed at the Red Cross shop three days every week. Even Mrs. Carrie Payson seemed to realize that driving about the parks and boulevards on summer afternoons was not quite the thing. When autumn came she was selling Liberty Bonds in the sure-fire manner of a professional. As for great-aunt Charlotte--the hand that had sewed and folded and stitched during the four years of the '60s and that had fashioned the prize-winning patchwork silk quilt in the '70s had not lost its cunning. She knitted with a speed and perfection nothing short of miraculous, turning out a sweater in three days, a pair of socks in two. The dip, bite, and recovery of her needles was machine-like in its regularity. She folded and rolled bandages as well, having enrolled in a Red Cross shop established in the parlours of a near-by hotel. Even Jeannette had been caught by the spirit of the new order. Her wage as stenographer was a queenly sum these days; and while she could not resist silk stockings, new hats, expensive blouses, and gloves, and talked of a fur coat for the coming winter (every self-respecting stenographer boasted one by December) she still had enough left to contribute freely to every drive, fund, association, and relief committee connected with the war. She had long ago paid back the hundred dollars to that Otto who had been whisked away in the first draft. Even Hulda in the kitchen had deserted her yards of crochet for a hank of wool. Henry Kemp worked nights as a member of the district draft board. Charley danced in benefits all the way from Lake Forest to South Chicago, and enrolled as Emergency Driver for Sunday work. Alone, of all the family, Belle remained aloof. True, she knitted now and then, languidly. But the Red Cross sewing gave her a headache, she said; the excitement affected her digestive disorder. She was anti-war, anti-draft, anti-Wilson.