“No, dad. I want it all settled first.”
“I—I don’t know what it will do to her,” Carter struggled on feebly.
“She’ll take it right,” declared the boy with conviction. “She’ll take it right because—because it’s for women like her that we’re going over there.”
Carter did not reach for the paper, even then. He merely found it in his hands. He drew out his fountain pen and the name he scrawled upon the dotted line might have been written by a man of eighty.
“That’s the good old dad,” Ben whispered hoarsely as he replaced the paper in his pocket. “You’re a brick.”
Carter tried to see it that way. There were moments even when he thought he was going to feel proud. A day or two later, when Newell, Culver and the others on the eight-ten heard of it, they hurried up to him and shook his hand with such phrases as “The boy has the right stuff in him, Carter,” and “He makes us glad we live in Edgemere.” All Carter could do was to turn away.
The boy’s going left a great big hollow place in Carter—a hollow that only grew bigger when he began to receive the lad’s enthusiastic letters from the training camp. He missed him in a way that disturbed every detail of his daily life. When he woke up in the morning it was with a sense of some deep tragedy hanging over him—as though the boy were dead. This sent him downstairs depressed and irascible. His coffee with its abominable sirup tasted more bitter than ever. The mere sight of the war doughnuts irritated him. It was as though they made mock of him. Half the time the omelet was burned, for Kitty was becoming more forgetful than ever, and more often than not did not remember the omelet at all until she smelled it smoking. She did her best to cheer Carter up, until she found the wisest thing to do was to say nothing. As a matter of fact everything she said sounded to him as hypocritical as all the confounded war substitutes with which he found himself more and more hemmed in. Newell particularly was full of new recipes for foods and drinks that he claimed were as good as the original articles, and was forever pulling clippings from his pockets on the morning train.
“You ought to get your wife to try this, Carter,” he broke out one day. “It’s a new recipe for cake without sugar, wheat or butter. Ellen made some last night and you couldn’t tell it from the real stuff.”
“What do you call the real stuff?” demanded Carter.
“Why, the cake we used to get before the war.”