"Your son," I says, forgetting all about the roses, "he's in the American army?"
"He was," she said. "He fought in France for eighteen months. Now he has been discharged."
"Oh," I says to myself, "that arranges everything. It must."
"Perhaps you will let me tell you," she said. "He comes back to us wearing the cross of war."
"The cross of war!" I cried. "That they give when folks save folks in battle?" I said it just like saving folks is the principal business of it all.
"My son did save a wounded officer in No-man's land," she told me. "The officer—he was a white man."
"Oh," I says, and I couldn't say another word till I managed to ask her if her son had been in the draft.
"No," she said. "He volunteered April 7, 1917."
It wasn't until I got out in the street that I remembered I hadn't thanked her for the roses at all. But there wasn't time to think of that.
I headed straight for Mis' Silas Sykes. She looked awful bad, and I don't think probably she'd slept a wink all night. I ask' her casual how the reception was coming on, and she kind of began to cry.