If she had had a little dog at home, it would have barked at her in unrecognition and convinced her that she was not herself.
What astounded her was the realization that the problem of disregarding either her love or her duty was no longer a difficult problem. In London, when she had dimly suspected her benefactors, the Weblings, of betraying the trust that England put in them, she had abhorred the thought of mentioning her surmise to any one who might harm them. Later, at the shipyard, when she had suspected her sister’s husband of disloyalty, she had put away the thought of action because it would involve her sister’s ruin. But now, as she left Baltimore, convinced that her sister’s husband was in a plot against her lover and her country, she felt hardly so much as a brake on her eagerness for the sacrifice of her family or herself. The horror had come to be a solemn duty so important as to be almost pleasant. She was glad to have something at last to give up for her nation.
The thorough change in her desires was due to a complete change in her soul. She had gradually come to love the man whose prosperity was threatened by her sister’s husband, and her vague patriotism had been stirred from dreams to delirium. Almost the whole world was undergoing such a war change. The altar of freedom so shining white had recently become an altar of sacrifice splashed with the blood of its votaries. 284 Men were offering themselves, casting from them all the old privileges of freedom, the hopes of success in love and business, and submitting to discipline, to tyranny, to vile hardships. Wives and mothers were hurrying their men to the slaughter; those who had no men to give or men too weak for the trenches or unwilling to go were ashamed of themselves because they were missing from the beadroll of contributors.
Mamise had become fanatic with the rest. She had wished to build ships, and had been refused more than a stenographer’s share in the process. Next she had planned to go to the firing-line herself and offer what gift she had––the poor little gift of entertaining the soldiers with the vaudeville stunts she had lived down. And while she waited for a passport to join the army of women in France, she found at hand an opportunity to do a big deed, to thwart the enemy, to save ships and all the lives that ships alone could save. The price would be the liberty and what little good name her sister’s husband had; it would mean protests and tears from her poor sister, whom life had dealt with harshly enough already.
But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what it would buy. She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded chair-car, but her inner being was shaken with joy. She had learned to love Davidge and to adore that strange, shapeless idea that she called her country. Instead of sacrificing her lover to her people, she could serve both by the same deed. She was wildly impatient for the moment when she could lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured at the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost her a decade in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they were worth it.
She reached Washington at a little after eleven and Grinden Hall before midnight. Now as she stood on the portico and looked across the river at the night-lit city, she felt such a pride as she had never known.
She waved a salutation to the wraith of a town, her mind, if not her lips, voicing the words:
“You owe me something, old capital. You’ll never put up any statues to me or carve my name on any tablets, but I’m doing something for you that will mean more than anybody will ever realize.”
She turned and found the black maid gaping at her sleepily 285 and wondering what invisible lover she was waving at. Mamise made no explanation, but went in, feeling a trifle foolish, but divinely so.
Polly got out of bed and came all bundled up to Mamise’s room to demand an accounting.