That man left an indelible impression on my mind. I went home that night disgusted with Jay-Jay and disgusted with Leon. Jay-Jay said that if the United States went into the War, he’d be glad he could help his father run the show business (in which case there would have been a deluge of rotten shows on Broadway) and Leon suffered the tortures of hell every time the World War was mentioned. They both seemed like worms to me. I couldn’t understand their attitude at all. And I once more cried out against the fate which had made me a girl instead of a boy. I sent up prayer after prayer and called on the Lord to do something about it all. It seemed to me that if Leon were more of a man I would automatically become more of a girl and I told the Lord as much, but I also suggested that if he couldn’t do anything about Leon he could at least make something happen that would give me a chance to break out and get a little of the adventurous poison out of my system. Well, all of a sudden it appeared that a couple of Yankees had finally got into Heaven: my prayers were answered! CHAPTER 2 CORRESPONDENCE FROM HEAVEN It never rains but it pours. Here I had worried through seventeen years without any answers at all to my prayers and now in a few short months there were more answers than there were prayers—I mean, it was just like having your mail lost somewhere and then getting it all in a bunch. It seemed to me that the Lord must have just returned from a holiday playing golf with the planets and found all my pleas and prayers awaiting his attention, so he set about clearing his desk immediately and thoroughly. Things came so thick that the year 1917 remains in my mind a jumbled nightmare. Not that everything happened as quickly at all that: the sequence was spread over several months but I had become so accustomed to monotony and so resigned to my fate, that so many things in even so many months was a terrific shock to my nervous system. The first thing that happened was not strictly my own private affair. The United States went to war when Germany added insult to injury. I was overjoyed, because it seemed to me that surely here was an opportunity for excitement and adventure.... And again I was disappointed. Girls of eighteen are good for only one thing in a war, and you don’t get medals and service stripes for that kind of duty! Jay-Jay went to work for his father, hoping to get out of going, and then when he saw he would be caught in the draft he managed to secure a soft job supervising the entertainment provisions of the eastern training camps. My hero! A man’s man!