"She is older than you, and she will be at home. The advances, of course, must come from her, but I hope, dear, you will not be—you will try to be responsive?"
"I never know, mother, when I am not responsive. It's like wrinkling my forehead; it does itself."
Mrs. Valentin made a gesture expressive of the futility of argument under certain not unfamiliar conditions.
"'You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.' I am leading my Pegasus to the fountain of—what was the fountain?"
Elsie laughed. "Your Pegasus is pretty heavy on the wing, mammy. But I will drink. I will gorge myself, truly I will. The money shall not be spent in vain."
"Oh, the money! Who cares about the money?—if only there were more of it."
They stopped over night in Chicago, and Mrs. Valentin bought some shirt-waists; for the heat had "doubled up on them," as a Kansas farmer on the train remarked.
Elsie trailed about the shops with her mother, not greatly interested in shirt-waists or bargains in French underclothing.
The war pressure seemed to close in upon them as they left the mid-West and drew toward the coast once more. The lists from El Caney were throbbing over the wires, and the country, so long immune from peril and suffering, was awakening to the cost of victory. There was a terrible flippancy in the irrepressible spirit of trade which had seized upon the nation's emblems, freshly consecrated in the blood of her sons, and was turning them to commercial account,—advertising, in symbols of death and priceless devotion, that ribbons or soap or candy were for sale. The flag was, so to speak, dirt-cheap. You could wear it in a hatband or a necktie; you could deface it, or tear it in two, in opening an envelope addressed to you by your bootmaker.
Elsie cast hunted eyes on the bulletin boards. She knew by heart that first list after Las Guasimas. One glance had burned it in forever. It had become one of the indelible scars of a lifetime. Yet those were the names of strangers. If a whiff from an avalanche can fell trees a mile away, how if the avalanche strike you?