"That's it. Don't you give in. You're twenty. Don't you give in. I was scared when you left your work----" "Oh, that. I couldn't stay. I don't know. Restless." "That's all right," said Aunt Charlotte, satisfied. "Restless is all right. Restless is better than resigned." Of Jesse Dick's poems, two made a little furore. The reviewers all had a line or two or three about his having been one of the most promising of the younger poets of the virile school. They said his was American poetry, full of crude power. One poem--the one called "Chemin des Dames"--they even learned in the schools, mispronouncing its title horribly, of course. They took it seriously, solemnly. Charley alone knew that it had been written in satire and derision. It was his protest against all the poems about scarlet poppies and Flanders fields. Taken seriously, it was indeed a lovely lyric thing. Taken as Charley knew he had meant it, it was scathing, terrible. People thought the one called "Death" was a little too bitter. Good--but bitter, don't you think? That part beginning: "They said you were majestic, Death. Majestic! You! I know you for the foolish clown you are; A drooling zany, mouth agape and legs asprawl, A grotesque scarecrow on a barbed wire fence. ...." When Charley read that one, as she often did, she would beat with her hard young fist on her knee and cry impotent tears of rage at the uselessness of it all. They made a book of his poems and brought it out in the autumn, just before the armistice. A slim book of poems. There had been so few of them. CHAPTER XVIII Charley was away when Lottie came home in February, following that historic hysteric November. Charley was in Cincinnati, Ohio, dancing with the Krisiloff Russian ballet. They were playing Cincinnati all that week, and the future bookings included Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, Akron. Charley wrote that they would be back in Chicago for two weeks at the end of March, showing one week at the Palace and one at the Majestic. "... And what's all this," she wrote Lottie, "about your having brought back a French war orphan? There never was such a gal for orphans. Though I must say you did pretty well with Jeannette. Mother wrote me about her wedding. But this orphan sounds so young. And a girl, too. I'm disappointed. While you were about it it seems to me you might have picked a gentleman orphan. We certainly need some men in our family. Send me a picture, won't you? I hope she isn't one of those awfully brune French babies that look a mixture of Italian and Yiddish and Creole. In any case I'm going to call her Coot. Are you really going to adopt her? That would be nice, but mad. Did Grandmother raise an awful row? I'm sorry she's feeling no better. Mother wrote you have a trained nurse now...."