There was a note in his voice by which she knew it wasn’t bloaters from the fish-shop over the way. But she no more expected what it really was than she hoped for an angel to lean out of the windows of the sky and say, “Mary Black, here’s a gold crown for you.” The paper crackled in the silent room while she untied the string. The chain just shimmered once through her fingers. Her lips trembled. With a little cry, “O Jim!” she turned to lay her head in the old forgotten place on his shoulder. And there she sobbed out all the bitterness of seven years’ married hardship and privation with the bearing and rearing of five children in three rooms on 22 shillings a week. Oh, there are things that gold chains are good for more than show. The famous uses of adversity are various. But they have been much oversung. And after all, God in his heaven perhaps knows that even a war may be worth while, if it’s the only way. Two wage envelopes are better than one. The new woman with the old love revived in her heart, I’m sure, won’t be so often cross and she won’t have to slap the children so much as she did. Just think of the new home that the man at the front’s coming back to! Mrs. Black’s saving now for a piano! Mrs. Lewis, are you ready? The work-whistle calls you. My morning paper to-day advertises for a New York department store: “To patriotic women seeking practical means of expressing their earnestness: During the coming season, women of intelligence will have the greatest opportunity that was ever offered them to become producing factors on the nation’s industrial balance sheet. Whether they need to work or not, they should work, because it will make them happier and give them a sense of satisfaction as nothing else in the world can under present circumstances. We can give many women work to do to occupy part of their time. This part-time work affords a woman, if she has home duties, plenty of leisure for her own housework—she need not leave her home in the morning until after the man of the house goes. She may return in the evening before he does—she will have more money for her home or for herself and be an independent producing factor in her community, helping herself, her home, and in this way her country in a time when this kind of help is most needed.”