“Um—’m.” Mrs. Johnson firmed her lips to a straight line, and nodded her head up and down heavily. “Yes, they couldn’t do one thing with him.”
“But—but what was the matter with him?” Julie persisted.
“I don’t know. He just cried all the time. Lost his nerve, I reckon. They sent him back home. They said he wasn’t no good to them. His father feels terrible; says he always was a nervous kind of a boy, an’ his mother humored him along till she just ruined him.”
“Oh, the poor boy!” Julie cried.
“Well my Lord, Julie! Just s’pose all our men were like that; what would Uncle Sam do?”
“Oh, of course, I know. Only—how awful it was for him!”
“Well, I’m mighty glad he ain’t my son,” Aunt Sadie retorted. “It’ll be a thing people’ll throw up against him all his life. Folks won’t forget it in a hurry. Well,”—she dragged her large figure up out of the plush rocker,—“If you won’t go with me to the picture show, I reckon I’ll just have to go ask Mis’ Bixby; she’s better’n no company.”
She went, and after a little Julie heard her and Elizabeth Bixby setting forth. Julie sat on alone, knitting under the light, her mind filled with distressful thoughts about the Chapin boy, who found camp so awful and the prospect of death in France so overpowering, that he could do nothing but cry. “How dreadful!” Julie thought. “What was the matter with him? What made him go to pieces like that? Other men stood up against it; what was the matter with the Chapin boy? Oh, the poor boy! The poor thing! How frightful to give way like that, with all the camp to see!”
As far as she could remember, she had never talked to the Chapin boy and had not seen him very often. She recalled him as a thin gangling youth, with a prominent Adam’s apple and shallow, frightened blue eyes. And now he was at home again with a disgrace like that. “Oh, the poor boy!” she thought again, horrified at the spiritual collapse that would make one’s pride and reserve go down and leave one exposed before the whole world. “It’s just what I might do if I were a man—just the way I might have acted. Oh, I’m glad I’m not a man!” she told herself.
Suddenly in the stillness she heard a sharp sound in the hall. It startled her so that her hands on the knitting-needles jumped together. “Oh, what is that?” she thought. She listened rigidly a minute, and heard a creaking on the stairway. With an effort, she wrenched herself up, and stepping to the door pressed the electric button. As the light flashed up in the hall, she saw Mr. Bixby’s white face looking down at her from the stairway.