Mrs. Thrift put a final question. She had to. "Had you ever kissed him before?"
"Oh, no!" cried Charlotte so earnestly that they could not but believe. Then, quiveringly, as one bereaved, cheated, "Oh, no! No! Never! Not once.... Not once."
The glance that Mrs. Thrift shot at her husband then was a mingling of triumph and relief.
Isaac Thrift and his wife did not mean to be hard and cruel. They had sprung from stern stock. Theirs was the narrow middle-class outlook of members of a small respectable community. According to the standards of that community Charlotte Thrift had done an outrageous thing. War, in that day, was a grimmer, though less bloody and wholesale, business than it is to-day. An army whose marching song is Where Do We Go From Here? attaches small significance to the passing kiss of an hysterical flapper, whether the object of the kiss be buck private or general. But an army that finds vocal expression in The Battle Cry of Freedom and John Brown's Body is likely to take its bussing seriously. The publicly kissed soldier on his way to battle was the publicly proclaimed property of the kissee. And there in front of the Court House steps, in full sight of her world—the Addison Canes, the Thomas Holcombs, the Lewis Fullers, the Clapps—Charlotte Thrift, daughter of Isaac Thrift, had run after, had thrown her arms about, and had kissed a young man so obscure, so undesirable, so altogether an unfitting object for a gently-bred maiden's kisses (public or private) as to render valueless her kisses in future.
Of Charlotte's impulsive act her father and mother made something repulsive and sinister. She was made to go everywhere, but was duennaed like a naughty Spanish princess. Her every act was remarked. Did she pine she was berated and told to rouse herself; did she laugh she was frowned down. Her neat little escritoire frequently betrayed traces of an overhauling by suspicious alien fingers. There was little need of that after the first few days. The news of Jesse Dick's death at Donelson went almost unnoticed but for two Chicago households—one out Hardscrabble way, one on Wabash Avenue. It was otherwise as unimportant as an uprooted tree in the path of an avalanche that destroys a village. At Donelson had fallen many sons of Chicago's pioneer families; young men who were to have carried on the future business of the city; boys who had squired its daughters to sleigh-rides, to dances, to church sociables and horseback parties; who had drilled with Ellsworth's famous Zouaves. A Dick of Hardscrabble could pass unnoticed in this company.
There came to Charlotte a desperate and quite natural desire to go to his people; to see his mother; to talk with his father. But she never did. Instinctively her mother sensed this (perhaps, after all, she had been eighteen herself, once) and by her increased watchfulness made Hardscrabble as remote and unattainable as Heaven.
"Where are you going, Charlotte?"
"Just out for a breath of air, mother."
"Take Carrie with you."
"Oh, mother, I don't want——"