When later Mrs. Keith RoBards came round to call with her richly bedizened and bediapered son, Patty had such important news to tell her, that Keith Junior’s nose would have been put out of joint if it had been long enough to have a joint. In gratifying contrast with Frances’ autocratic motherhood, Aletta was so ignorant, or tactfully pretended to be, and so used to being bullied, so glad of any kindness, that Patty took entire command of the fresh jasmine-flower and was less a grandmother than a miraculously youthful mother—for a while, for a respite—while before the world renewed the assaults it never ceases long to make upon the happiness of every one of its prisoners. CHAPTER XLVII Having lost one son in the war and expecting to hear at any moment that her other boy was gone, Patty was bitter now against the mothers who kept their sons at home, as she had tried to keep hers. The fear grew that the war, which had already cost her so dear, might be lost for lack of men to reinforce the Federal troops. Those whom the first thrill had not swept off their feet, found self-control easier and easier when they were besought to fill the gaps left by the sick, the crippled and the dead in the successless armies. Their apathy woke to action, however, when the hateful word Conscription was uttered by the desperate administration. The draft law was passed, and it woke a battle ardor in those who cling to peace whenever their country is at war. For there has always been about the same proportion of citizens who are inevitably against the government, whatever it does. Sometimes they prate of loyalty to a divinely commissioned monarch or a mother country, as in Washington’s day; sometimes they love the foreigner so well that they denounce a war of conquest, as in the Mexican war; sometimes they praise the soft answer and the disarming appeal of friendly counsel, as in this war with the fierce South. Now, when the draft lowered, the New York pacifists mobilized, set the draft-wheels on fire and burned the offices and such other buildings as annoyed them. They abused Lincoln as a gawky Nero, and, to prove their hatred of war, they formed in mobs and made gibbets of the lamp-posts where they set aswing such negroes as they could run down. They killed or trampled to death policemen and soldiers, insulted and abused black women and children, and, in a final sublimity of enthusiasm, grew bold enough to charge upon the Negro Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue near the Reservoir. Somebody led the two hundred pickaninnies there to safety through the back door while the mob stormed the front, and burned the place to ashes. For three days the city was a monstrous madhouse with the maniacs in control. Thousands descended on the central police station and would have destroyed it if a few hundred police had not flanked them with simultaneous charges down side streets, and clubbed them into a stampede.