“You and I are allies now,” Kedzie murmured to the Marquess. She thought a trifle better of her country.
The Austrian prima donna fainted and could not appear in the last act, and everybody went home expecting to see the vigor of Uncle Sam displayed in a swift and tremendous delivery of a blow long, long withheld.
The vigor was displayed in a tremendous delivery of words far better withheld.
It was a week before Congress agreed that war existed and over a month passed before Congress agreed upon the nature of the army to be raised. Nearly four months passed before the draft was made.
Jim Dyckman was almost glad of the delay, for it gave him hope of settling his spiritual affairs in time to be a soldier. He was determined to marry Charity as soon as the three months' probation term was over. But Charity said no! Cowering in seclusion from the eyes of her world, she cherished a dream that when the war broke and the dead began to topple and the wounded to bleed, she might expiate the crime she had not committed, by devoting to her own people her practised mercies. She was afraid to offer them now, or even to make her appearance among the multitudinous associations that sprang up everywhere in a frantic effort to make America ready in two weeks for a war that had been inevitable for two years. Not only a war was to be fought, but a world famine.
Charity was ashamed to show her white face even at the Red Cross. She busied herself with writing checks for the snow-storm of appeals that choked her mail. Otherwise she pined in idleness, refusing more than ever the devotion that Jim offered her now in a longing that increased with denial.
She suffered infinitely, yet mocked her own sufferings as petty trifles. She contrasted them with what the millions on millions of Europe's men were enduring as they huddled in the snow-drenched, grenade-spattered trenches, or agonized in all their wounds out in the No-Man's Land between the trenches. She told herself that her own heartaches were negligible, despicable against the innumerable anguishes of the women who saw their men, their old men, their young men, their lads, going into the eternal mills of the war, while hunger and loneliness and toil unknown to women before made up their daily portion.
She accused herself for still remaining apart from that continental sisterhood of grief. All America seemed to be playing Hamlet, debating, deferring, letting irresolution inhibit every necessary duty.
Since her country had disowned her and refused her justice or chivalry, she was tempted to disown her country and claim citizenship among those who could fight and could sacrifice and could endure.
It was not easy to persuade a captain to take a woman passenger aboard his ship, now that the German ambition was to sink a million tons a month, but she resolved again to go if she had to stowaway.