“Sugar is one thing.”
“Oh, well,” said Laura, “I’d rather a little Belgian had my extra pounds, poor scrap! Of course, now and then I get hungry for it, though Mother gives us all the maple we want, but when I do get hungry, I think about the Belgians and the people of northern France who have lost their homes, and of all those children over there who haven’t enough to eat to make them want to play; and I think about the British fleet and what it has kept us from for four years; and about the thousands of girls who have given their youth and prettiness to making munitions. I think about things like that and then I say 122 to myself, ‘My goodness, what is a little sugar, more or less!’ Why, Elliott, we don’t begin to feel the war over here, not as they feel it!”
Elliott, who considered that she felt the war a good deal, demurred. “I have lost my home,” she said, feeling a little ashamed of the words as she said them.
“But it is there,” objected Laura. “Your home is all ready to go back to, isn’t it? That’s my point.”
“And there’s Father,” said Elliott.
“I know, and my brothers. But I don’t feel that I have done anything in their being in the army. It is doing them lots of good: every letter shows that. And, anyway, I’d be ashamed if they didn’t go.”
“Something might happen,” said Elliott. “What would you say then?”
“The same, I hope. But what I mean is, the war doesn’t really touch us in the routine of our every-day living. We don’t 123 have to darken our windows at night and take, every now and then, to the cellars. The machinery of our lives isn’t thrown out of gear. We don’t live hand in hand with danger. But lots of us think we’re killed if we have to use our brains a little, if we’re asked to substitute for wheat flour, and can’t have thick frosting on our cake and eat meat three times a day. Oh, I’ve heard ’em talk! Why, our life over here isn’t really topsyturvy a bit!”
“Isn’t it?” There were things, Elliott thought, that Laura, wise as she was, didn’t know.
“We’re inconvenienced,” said Laura, “but not hurt.”