Julie turned and fled down to her own room, her heart pounding, and her knees rather weak beneath her. “But I will get in to her yet. I will, I will!” she told herself.
Later in the day she confessed her failure to Mrs. Watkins.
“Well, didn’t I tell you that was just the way it would be?” the other said, taking a gloomy satisfaction in the coming true of her prediction.
“But I will get in to help her yet,” Julie persisted. “She scares me; but I won’t let her shut herself up and suffer like that all alone. I can’t bear to think of it: it hurts me all through.”
“Well, she’s not the only one suffering these days,” Mrs. Watkins returned sombrely. “Look at the awful things happening in Europe: young men being killed, an’ children starving, an’ old folks driven out of their homes.” Mrs. Watkins was holding her youngest child, a little boy of two, in her arms and rocking as she spoke.
“I know,” Julie assented, “but that’s ’way off there across the ocean; Miss Fogg’s right here, right up over my head, suffering. The things that are happenin’ over there don’t seem so close.”
“Don’t it seem close when it’s our own men, our own boys, fightin’?” Mrs. Watkins challenged. “My Lord! my youngest brother’s over there right this minute! It don’t seem far away to me—nor to my mother.”
“I know, I know,” Julie answered hastily, breathlessly. “I know; but—”
“You’re lucky that your man don’t have to go. Why was it you said they turned him down?”
“It was—it was flat foot,” Julie said. She cleared her throat after she had said it, swallowing nervously, her eyes fixed upon her sewing.