Joan had taken a liking to the girl. It was a spiritual, vivacious face with frank eyes and a firm mouth; and the voice was low and strong. A fierce anger blazed up in her brain. Why should she listen? Why had reason been given to us if we were not to use it—weigh good and evil in the balance and decide for ourselves where lay the nobler gain? Were we to be led hither and thither like blind children? What was right—what wrong, but what our own God-given judgment told us? Was it wrong of the woman to perform this act of self-renunciation, yielding up all things to love? No, it was great—heroic of her. It would be her cross of victory, her crown.!

“I’m afraid you haven’t yet grasped the power of the Press,” he answered with a smile. “Phillips speaks occasionally to five thousand people. Carleton addresses every day a circle of five million readers.” “I think God must want you very badly,” she said, “or He wouldn’t have laid so heavy a cross upon you. You will come?”

“I want to,” she answered. “It isn’t all curiosity. I think it’s time for women to insist on seeing war with their own eyes, not trust any longer to the pictures you men paint.” She smiled. “If you’re going the whole hog, that’s something I can understand,” continued Flossie. “If not, you’d better pull up.” Of course. For war you wanted men, to fight. She had been thinking of them in the lump: hurrying masses such as one sees on cinema screens, blurred but picturesque. Of course, when you came to think of it, they would have to be made up of individuals—gallant-hearted, boyish sort of men who would pass through doors, one at a time, into little rooms; give their name and address to a soldier man seated at a big deal table. Later on, one would say good-bye to them on crowded platforms, wave a handkerchief. Not all of them would come back. “You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs,” she told herself.