What could I say, when you asked me, except the cruelly hard thing which I did say? Back of me, as back of you, lie the same fighting, plucky ancestors. The same heroic impulses that stirred their dust stir mine, and yours,--alas that it has but feminine dust to stir in me! To me, as to you, there is but one answer in the world to a question like that. There had never been any real doubt in my mind as to what you would do; I think that there had never been any real doubt in your own mind. In the great moments, life seems neither right nor wrong, but something greater; it seems inevitable. Poor Belgium and the baby in the cradle come back to my mind together, the highly "efficient" tomahawk replaced by the highly "efficient" siege guns. But even apart from the high justice of this issue, England was in trouble, England was fighting. What was there for you to do but help? I said only the one word "go," and even now I can recall the stillness and the wash of the ripples against our boat and through the grasses. The silence of perfect beauty rested on sky and tree and water, and the river no longer seemed a little inland stream flowing softly through grassy meadows with retarding locks, but a flowing passageway to some great sea. The days that followed I count off on my fingers as one counts a rosary; there were not many, not so many as our prayers. Such little scraps of them, mere fragments, come to me, shining fragments which I treasure and shall always treasure like bits of priceless jewels: in all my mental store there is nothing quite so precious. I was busy every minute, trying to console your mother and your sister, who thought you ought not to go; trying to make them see. It is as if the sun were still illuminating those days, making them forever radiant. It seemed enough to live, to try, to give one's all, not knowing; it was not hard _then_; nothing could be hard in moments of exaltation like those. They were full too of homely toil; such queer things we had to do in getting you ready, dear. Of course you were not a trained soldier; how to become a trained soldier in a week of short days is a harder problem than many a one in philosophy. When you decided that you would be a despatch bearer and join the motorcycle brigade, because thus you could go to the front sooner, I am proud that I did not say one word of protest, though I knew that it was the most dangerous task of all. Being a despatch bearer seemed a fitting service for an intellectual leader.