"That's the rub," Gertrude said, "we're so used to them. They're so--so preposterously necessary to us." Late that night clasped in each other's arms they admitted the extent of their desolation. Life had been robbed of a magic,--a mystery. The solid friendship of years of mutual trust and understanding was the background of so much lovely folly, so many unrealized possibilities, so many nebulous desires and dreams that the sudden dissolution of their circle was an unthinkable calamity. "We ought to have put out our hands and taken them if we wanted them," Gertrude said, out of the darkness. "Other women do. Probably these other women have. Men are helpless creatures. They need to be firmly turned in the right direction instead of being given their heads. We've been too good to our boys. We ought to have snitched them." "I wouldn't pay that price for love," Margaret said. "I couldn't. By the time I had made it happen I wouldn't want it." "That's my trouble too," Gertrude said. Then she turned over on her pillow and sobbed helplessly. "Jimmie had such ducky little curls," she explained incoherently. "I do this sometimes when I think of them. Otherwise, I'm not a crying woman." Margaret put out a hand to her; but long after Gertrude's breath began to rise and fall regularly, she lay staring wide-eyed into the darkness. CHAPTER XXI ELEANOR HEARS THE NEWS "Dear Uncle Jimmie: "I said I would write you, but now that I have taken this hour in which to do it, I find it is a very, very hard letter that I have got to write. In the first place I can't believe that the things you said to me that night were real, or that you were awake and in the world of realities when you said them. I felt as if we were both dreaming; that you were talking as a man does sometimes in delirium when he believes the woman he loves to be by his side, and I was listening the same way. It made me very happy, as dreams sometimes do. I can't help feeling that your idea of me is a dream idea, and the pain that you said this kind of a letter would give you will be merely dream pain. It is a shock to wake up in the morning and find that all the lovely ways we felt, and delicately beautiful things we had, were only dream things that we wouldn't even understand if we were thoroughly awake.