)"
IV
In December, nineteen-fourteen, Alexina and Alice Thorndyke (who grasped
the entering wedge with both ruthless white little hands) went to France.
Aileen was not strong enough to nurse so she bade a passionate good-by
to her friends and engaged herself to Bob Cheever. Jimmie Thorne went to
France as an ambulance driver, and Bascom Luning to join the Lafayette
Escadrille. Gora sailed six months later to offer her services to England.
In the case of a nurse there was much red tape to unravel.
A fair proportion of the women left behind continued to knit. As time went
on branches of certain French war-relief organizations were formed, and
run by such capable women as Mrs. Thornton and Mrs. Hunter, who had many
friends among the American women living in France; now toiling day and
night at their oeuvres.
Alexina and Olive de Morsigny, after a year of nursing, when what little
flesh they had left could stand no more, founded an oeuvre of their own,
and Sibyl Bascom and Aileen Cheever did fairly well with a branch in San
Francisco, Alexina's relatives quite wonderfully in New York and Boston;
although they were already interested in many others.
V
Certain interests in California, notably the orchards and canneries, were
violently anti-British during the first years of the war, as the blockade
shut off their immense exports to Germany, and those that failed, or closed
temporarily, realized the incredible: that a war in Europe could affect
California, even as the Civil War affected the textile factories of
England.
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