The gray angels dyke a nation’s forceful common sense from becoming a flood of useless sentiment, expending itself no one knows where, lost to practical purposes. It would be the gray angels who would help win the violet crown because they gauge nothing in misleading blacks or whites, since life on this planet is not expressed in harsh, sweeping tones, but in neutral grays, partaking of both white and black, now foggy and bewildering, now serene and sweetly sad with lavender veiling, or rosy flecked and hopeful.
Bliss was a gray angel—Ernestine, Polly, Collin and Caleb had the possibilities of becoming them.
... “I believe I’m a gray angel, too,” Thurley thought with sudden delight.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Thurley had lingered at the Fincherie until the time grew so short she knew she must rush into her concert work without her customary rehearsals. She had word from Bliss Hobart that he was on his way West to speak for patriotic matters and arrange some musical things and he had left some music for her and advice as to a difficult new rôle.
His letter did not create in Thurley the usual rebellion against Bliss’s reserved self or her own foolish pledge. She was too busy casting ahead for coming events, wondering how her opportunity would arrive in which to prove her gray angel self and best to help Bliss’s vision to become practically demonstrated.
She said good-by with reluctance to Dan’s son and his foolish, ineffectual little mother whose head was temporarily in a whirl of excitement. Lorraine was to face readjustment as much as the man who would return to civilian life minus an arm. It seemed to Thurley that perhaps here was where gray angel demonstration must begin—to stop Lorraine’s neglect of her home and child, and convince her that when Dan came back expecting to find the same gentle wife whose house was her kingdom and whose outlook on life would be his tempering element—she must not fail him.
Yet Lorraine seemed beyond reason. Josie, Hazel, Cora and Owen, with another handful of equally featherweight mental calibre, had gone on their way rejoicing, they had had a farewell banquet with speeches made about their being “patriotic pilgrims” and had fitted bags presented as tokens of esteem....