"Take Carrie with you."
She stopped at home.
She had no tangible thing over which to mourn; not one of those bits of paper or pasteboard or linen or metal over which to keen; nothing to hold in her two hands, or press to her lips or wear in her bosom. She did not even possess one of those absurd tintypes of the day showing her soldier in wrinkled uniform and wooden attitude against a mixed background of chenille drapery and Versailles garden. She had only her wound and her memory and perhaps these would have healed and grown dim had not Isaac Thrift and his wife so persistently rubbed salt in the one and prodded the other. After all, she was little more than eighteen, and eighteen does not break so readily. If they had made light of it perhaps she would soon have lifted her head again and even cast about for consolation.
"Moping again!"
"I'm not moping, father."
"What would you call it then?"
"Why, I'm just sitting by the window in the dusk. I often do. Even before—before——"
"There's enough and to spare for idle hands to do, I dare say. Haven't you seen to-day's paper nor heard of what's happened again at Manassas that you can sit there like that!"
She knew better than to explain that for her Jesse Dick died again with the news of each fresh battle.
She became curiously silent for so young a girl. During those four years she did her share with the rest of them; scraped lint, tore and rolled bandages, made hospital garments, tied comforters, knitted stockings and mittens, put up fruit and jellies and pickles for the soldiers. Chicago was a construction camp. Regiments came marching in from all the states north. Camp Douglas, south of Thirty-first Street, was at first thick with tents, afterward with wooden barracks. Charlotte even helped in the great Sanitary Fairs that lasted a week or more. You would have noticed no difference between this girl and the dozens of others who chirped about the flag-decked booths. But there was a difference. That which had gone from her was an impalpable something difficult to name. Only if you could have looked from her face to that of the girl of the old photograph—that girl in the sweeping habit, with the plume, and the rose held carelessly in one hand—you might have known. The glow, the bloom, the radiance—gone.