When I looked at him questioningly, wondering what he meant, he said, "Oh, I know they're brown, not blue, but you showed my boy the star of 'true blue' courage in them, and I was horribly afraid for a few minutes there that maybe you wouldn't."
He talked about service flags all the way home, for we kept coming across them in the windows in every street. Over two hundred men have gone out from this little fishing town. When I told him how I felt that way, about "keeping step," he said he wished I could make some other people he knew feel the same way.
"There's poor Mrs. Carver, for instance, crying her eyes out over Titcomb and Sammy III, and talking as if she's the only mother in the world who's sacrificing anything. If you could suggest that those boys would be a bit prouder of her if she could keep step with the rest of the mothers, make her sacrifice with her head up, it would do her a world of good. She mustn't fly service stars in her window unless she can back them on the inside with the same true blue courage they stand for on the outside—the kind that sends the men to the front."
CHAPTER XXIII
MARKED ON THE CALENDAR
It's queer what a way Doctor Wynne has of stepping abruptly into my life and out again. It's been so ever since I found his picture in the barrel. A few days after Richard left he unexpectedly opened the front gate and came up to the porch where Tippy and I sat knitting. I did not recognize him at first in his captain's uniform, and no one could have been further from my thoughts. I supposed he had already sailed for France.
Some business with old Mr. Carver, who is giving an ambulance to the Red Cross, brought him to Provincetown, and, happening to hear that Miss Susan Triplett was at our house, he came up to say goodbye to her before starting to join the unit to which he's been assigned. He was disappointed when he found that Miss Susan had gone back to Wellfleet. He said she was one of the few people left who had known his family intimately, and who remembered him as a child. It gave him a sense of kinship to have her call him "Johnny" in a world where everyone else said "Doctor."