An element in the crust, and a hard one, was her desire not to be disturbed in her prosperity. She was making money. The whole face of Sabinsport had been changed in the year and a half since the war began. The great wire mill had trebled its plant and was running in three shifts, day and night. The old linoleum factory around the Point had never stopped growing. There were 2,000 girls there now, the pick of Sabinsport and all the country round. When you can make twenty to forty dollars a week, for eight hours' work, as these girls were doing, you can get pretty nearly any wage-earning woman that you want, so Sabinsport had discovered. Teachers had left the schools throughout the county, stenographers had left their desks, clerks had left the counters, and the farmers' daughters for miles around had flocked into the factory. This meant business for Sabinsport. Months before her housing capacity had outrun the demand. The onrush of strange men and women had raised a score of difficult and delicate problems; but it all meant money. Never had the shops of Sabinsport made so much, never had they charged so much. And this prosperity had made a new class in Sabinsport, a new kind of rich--the munition rich they called them. They succeeded the class whose fortunes had been made in the factories, as that class had succeeded one whose fortunes came from franchises; immediately back of which lay those made rich by coal, the successors of the original land rich. And, like each successive new rich class, they brought into the town an element of vulgarity which their predecessors had been gradually living down, the kind of hard and reckless vulgarity which the sudden possession of money almost invariably causes. There were not a few in Sabinsport whose families had outlived all this unpleasant phase of wealth, who felt and talked very hardly of this class. There was no question that they helped in the forming of the crust over Sabinsport's soul. There was still another element, which had much to do, I am convinced, with a certain tenaciousness in the crust, and that was the conviction that Germany was bound to win; and all they wanted, since this was so, was to see it over--stopped--get the sound of it out of their ears, the stench of it out of their nostrils. No, Germany could not be beaten. She had driven back Russia. She had won at Gallipoli, she had stripped Serbia from its people and driven king and army to take refuge on an island of the sea. She had devised unheard of weapons of terror and destruction in the air and under the water. She stood surrounded by enemies, but enemies divided by seas, divided in command, untrained and unfurnished; sure, and daily more brutal and fearful because so sure. Sabinsport did not believe she could be conquered. She had a great distaste for the conclusion, but a fact was a fact, and what reason had you to suppose she could be held when once she advanced? She would not make a second mistake on the Marne.