Sometimes the woman who has fallen secretly avoids her friends and acquaintances, because she knows that to keep up relations is a form of cheating, for which she will be the more severely punished when her deflection is known. I suppose Helen, who had every virtue, felt the impending mortification of her situation, when it became known in Shannon that her husband had deserted her. She came in, wearing a plain, long coat with a fine fur collar and a close-fitting fur hat. She was received cordially and a place was made for her at the long table where the bandages were being rolled. She sat on the edge of her chair, as if she must be going presently. She was not smiling. She appeared years younger, and there was a lost look in her blue eyes which no one noticed. She took off her coat, in response to Mrs. Shaw’s invitation; but she had only a moment to stay, slipping off this garment and revealing her figure slender as a pencil in a blue frock of some smooth stuff smartly buttoned to her chin. “We are glad to see you back here, Helen,” Mrs. Shaw said. Helen said “Thank you” for the simple reason that she could not pretend to be glad of anything. A mania for veracity makes you inelastic, uncouth and ungraceful socially. Mrs. Flitch asked her when she was expecting “George.” It was a shot in the dark, and she did not mean it. But she was a woman whose very instinct could aim accurately at your vulnerable point. “I am not expecting Mr. Cutter at all,” Helen replied. Mrs. Flitch had to take this answer, which was too frank to excite suspicion. But she did want to know if Helen expected to make her home in New York. “I suppose you will only come here now and then,” she suggested, looking over the top of her glasses at her victim. “I shall never live in New York. My home is here,” Helen answered, with the air of a person who would do this, but would not discuss her plans. She was one of those human “short circuits” who drops the periods in conversations and compels you to start another sentence on another topic. These women went back to the perpetual discussions that raged at that time in every Red Cross working room, about the specifications for wounded soldiers’ dressing gowns. Mrs. So-and-So’s work had been returned, because she had put too many pockets--or not enough pockets--on the gowns she had made. Mrs. Flitch had suffered the outrage of having two sweaters returned because she had finished them around the bottom with a fancy rib stitch. “As if that made any difference. There is too much red tape in these Red Cross regulations,” she exclaimed. “They obstruct us more in the work than the wire entanglements in France obstruct the advance of the German Army.” This was not true, but it was so aptly put that a murmur of sympathetic comment followed while needles flew and threads snapped.