CHAPTER XXII
"THE MAID WHO BINDS HER WARRIOR'S SASH"
I couldn't tell Tippy. The way we did I just handed her Barby's night letter without a word and Richard gave her his. She read them with no more change of expression than if they'd been weather reports. Then she said that she'd known it all along. A wooden Indian couldn't have been less demonstrative, but later I found that nothing could have pleased her more.
Richard says she can't help being born a Plymouth Rock. She's like an ice-bound brook that can't show the depth and force underlying the surface coldness. But her tenderness leaked out for us both afterwards, in all sorts of ways, and I began to understand her for the first time in my life.
She watched me take down the service flag in the window and replace it with one bearing two stars, and I'm sure she read my thoughts. She's always had an uncanny way of doing that. I was thinking how much harder it was to put up that second star than the first one, because I hadn't really given Father to the service. He was in it before I was born. But the second star was the symbol of a real sacrifice that I was laying on the altar of my country. There was no laughing this time, or joking suggestion to make a ceremony of it. I felt to the bottom of my heart what I was doing, and did it in reverent silence.
Soon after she followed me to my room and laid a couple of books on the table, open at the places marked for me to read. I smiled after she went out when I saw that one was an antiquated volume of poems. All my life she has tried to teach me morals and manners by the aid of such verse as "The boy stood on the burning deck" and "Fie! What a naughty child to pout." So I picked up the books wondering what lesson she thought I needed now. The poem she marked was "The Maid who binds her Warrior's sash." As I read I understood. Dear old Tippy! It was courage she would teach me.
Richard was right. She couldn't say these things to me, so she brought me the words of another to help me, knowing the lesson would soon be sorely needed. The other book was a new one she had just drawn from the library, the adventures of a young gunner in the Navy. He had won the Croix de Guerre for distinguished service and escaped the horrors of a German prison camp, so he knew what he was talking about when he wrote the words she left for me to read.