In the two weeks that followed Mrs. Payson never once relaxed her opposition. Yet she insisted on accompanying Lottie throughout the orgy of shopping that followed--scouring the stores for such commonplace articles as woollen stockings, woollen underwear, heavy shoes, bed socks, flannel bloomers, soap, hot water bag, candles, sugar, pins, needles. Sometimes her mother barely spoke to Lottie for hours. Yet strangely enough, Lottie had twice heard her say to a sympathetic clerk when she did not know Lottie was listening: "Yes, they are for my daughter who's going to France.... Yes, it is hard, but we've got to do our share." There had even been a ring of pride in her voice. Lottie heard her speaking at the telephone. "We'll miss her; but they need her more than we do." One could almost call it bragging. She had a strangely detached feeling about it all. When Henry spoke gravely of U-boats she felt immune, as when one hears of typhus in China. This person who was going to France was not Lottie Payson at all--Lottie Payson, aged thirty-three, of Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. This was some new, selfish, driven being to whom all the old familiar things and people--the house, the decrepit electric, Aunt Charlotte, her mother, Emma Barton--were remote and inconsequential. She and Charley had had one brief honest moment together. "I wanted to go too," Charley had said. "I do still. But I'm not going. I want to see Jesse. I want him so much that sometimes I find myself doing things that I thought only women in novels did. Stretching out my arms to him in the dark.... The girls of my sort who are going are going for the excitement of it--for the trip, you might almost say. Oh, I know a lot of women--thousands--are moved by the finest kind of patriotism. But--well, for example, that pretty Olive Banning who's in our advertising department. She's going. She says all the men are over there." The night before leaving, Lottie Payson suffered that agony of self-reproach and terror which unaccustomed travellers feel who are leaving all that is dear and safe and familiar. She lay there in bed in her quiet room and great waves of fear and dread swept over her--not fear of what she was going to, but of what she was leaving behind.