“And there’s no society at all up there?”
“Well, no, not exactly,” laughed Jean, shaking her head, “but there are lots of human beings.”
“I could never endure it in this world.”
Jean thought privately that there are many things one has to learn to endure whether or no, and someway, just that little talk made her feel a wonderful love and loyalty towards the Motherbird holding her home together up in the hills.
CHAPTER VII
THE CALL HOME
The second evening Aunt Win took them down to a Red Cross Bazaar at her club rooms. Jean enjoyed it in a way, although after the open air life and the quiet up home, overcrowded, steam-heated rooms oppressed her. She listened to a famous tenor sing something very fiery in French, and heard a blind Scotch soldier tell simply of the comfort the Red Cross supplies had brought to the little wayside makeshift hospital he had been taken to, an old mill inhabited only by owls and martins until the soldiers had come to it. Then a tiny little girl in pink had danced and the blind soldier put her on his shoulder afterwards while she held out his cap. It was filled with green bills, Jean saw, as they passed.
Then a young American artist, her face aglow with enthusiasm, stood on the platform with two little French orphans, a boy and girl. And she told of how the girl students had been the first to start the godmother movement, to mother these waifs of war.
“Wonderful, isn’t it, the work we’re doing?” said Aunt Win briskly, when it was over and they were in her limousine, bound uptown. “Doesn’t it inspire you, Jean?”
“Not one single bit,” Jean replied fervently. “I think war is awful, and I don’t believe in it. Up home we’ve made a truce not to argue about it, because none of us agree at all.”
“Well, child, I don’t believe in it either, but if the boys will get into these fights, it always has fallen to us women and always will, to bind up the wounds and patch them up the best we can. They’re a troublesome lot, but we couldn’t get along without them as I tell Mr. Everden.”