"Yes," she answered, honestly, "it was very real John; it was so real that in contrast nothing that I do now seems of any importance."
"But you never saw a wounded soldier—you never witnessed the horrors—you never came in actual touch with the suffering, did you?"
"No."
"And yet you say the war was real to you."
"Very real," she replied.
"Do you think, Helen," he said, slowly, "that the Interpreter's suffering would have been more real if he had lost his legs by a German machine gun instead of by a machine in father's mill?"
"John!" she exclaimed, in a shocked tone.
"You say the suffering away over there in France was real to you," he continued. "Well, less than a mile from this spot, I called this afternoon on a man who is dying by inches of consumption, contracted while working in our office. For eight years he was absent from his desk scarcely a day. The force nicknamed him 'Old Faithful.' When he dropped in his tracks at last they carried him out and stopped his pay. He has no care—nothing to eat, even, except the help that the Martins give him. Another case: A widow and four helpless children—the man was killed in McIver's factory last week. He died in agony too horrible to describe. The mother is prostrated, the children are hungry. God knows what will become of them this next winter. Another: A workman who was terribly burned in the Mill two years ago. He is blind and crippled in the bargain—"
She interrupted him with a protesting cry, "John, John, for pity's sake, stop!"
"Well, why are not these things right here at home as real to you as you say the same things were when they happened in France?" he demanded.