“There, now! Laws! Laws! These men folks! They will always be taking the high and sacred rights for themselves, while of course we poor women just sit home and keep the wood-box filled and pick lint and don’t have any high aspirations. Of course my mother back in Wilbr’am never wanted to do anything but cook father’s vittles. Oh, no!”
Her thin, charming little voice pretended to be very severe, but somehow Dad didn’t mind it. Indeed, he grinned a lively, happy, young little grin as he sat down beside her while she ran on.
“Well, if you must know, you had just as much influence over me as I had over you. I got thinking that it was a shame and a disgrace that I should be there at home just sitting and holding my hands that the good Lord gave me to do something with, when you were out fighting for your country. So I up and enlisted as a nurse.
“I did! Land o’ Goshen, if I hadn’t I guess it’d ’a’ pretty near driven me into high strikes to sit there day after day while you were riding off, land knows where, being shot and never, never changing your shoes and socks, no matter how wet they got!”
Dad’s hand had slipped along the worn old seat of many lovers toward hers, where it lay pink and soft and everlastingly capable against the weather-gray pine.
“So,” she went on, “I just went out and enlisted as a nurse. But what do you think? That snippet of a little lieutenant—and he’s just a doctor, and no more of a lieutenant than I am—he that was in charge of the nurses—he wa’n’t going to let me come when you called for me, and I just up and went. Captain, can’t you speak to him, you being his superior officer and all, and tell him he mustn’t be so high and mighty to women old enough to be his mother?”
She seemed to take him for the commander of all men—the man who had arranged everything and made everything just and good.
It was balm to Dad. Yet he said: “I’m afraid you were very insubordinate, Mrs.—”
He hesitated a little. The words tripped over one another in his throat. Then he brought out, roundly and commandingly:
“Ma’am, it isn’t right we should go on mistering each other when we’ve been such good friends and all, and—my name’s James.”