But I saw they were not as was thought. They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not, The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd, And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd, And the armies that remain'd suffer'd." Terrible years, years of bulletins, years of want, hard times, years when all the future was at stake, until finally that day in New York when she saw the remnant returning, marching up Broadway between the black crowds and the bunting, the drums beating, the fifes playing, "Returning, with thinned ranks, young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing." Henry Blaine was one of these and he came to her a cripple, an emaciated and sick man. Then had followed, as Joe knew, the marriage, the hard pioneer life in the shanty on the stony hill, the death, and the long widowhood.... Had she not a right to speak to him? "Understand?" she ended. "I think, Joe, I ought to understand.... I sent your father into the war...." Depth beneath depth he was discovering her. He was amazed and awed. He asked himself where he had been all these years, and how he had been so blind. He felt very young then. It was she who actually knew what the word social and the word patriotism meant. He looked down on the floor, and spoke in a whisper: "And ... would you send me off, too? The new war?" She could scarcely speak. "Whereto?" "I ... oh, I'll have to go down in a tenement somewhere--the slums...." "Well, then," she said, quietly, "I'll go with you." "But you--" he exclaimed, almost adding, "an old woman"--"it's impossible, mother." She answered him with the same quietness. "You forget the shanty." And then it was clear to him. Like an electric bolt it shot him, thrilling, stirring his heart and soul. She _would_ go with him; more than that, she _should_. It was her right, won by years of actual want and struggle and service. More, it was her escape from a flat, stale, meaningless boarding-house existence. Suddenly he felt that she was really his mother, knit to him by ties unbreakable, a terrible thing in its miraculousness. But he only said, in a strained voice, "All right, mother!" And she laughed, and mused, and murmured: "How does the world manage to keep so new and young?" V MYRA AND JOE Myra Craig used to dream at night that the fifty-seven members of her class arose from their desks with wild shrieks and danced a war-dance about her. This paralyzed her throat, her hands, and her feet, and she could only stand, flooded with horror, awaiting the arrival of the school principal and disgrace. Out of this teacher's dream she always awoke disgusted with school-work.