The war films in the motion picture
houses were quite wonderful, but too terrible.
They also discussed it, especially on those days when the streets echoed
with the march of departing regiments in khaki, or one's own son, or one's
friend's son enlisted or was drafted, or it was their day at Red Cross
headquarters.
All the older women were at work now, and all but the most irreclaimably
frivolous of the young ones. Even Tom and Maria Abbott made no protest
against Joan's joining the Woman's Motor Corps; and, dressed in a smart,
gray, boyish uniform, she drove her car at all hours of the day and night.
She was not only sincerely anxious to serve, but she knew, and sheltered
girls all over the land knew,--to say nothing of the younger married
women--that this was the beginning of their real independence, the knell of
the old order. They were freed. Even the reenforced concrete minds of the
last generation imperceptibly crumbled and were as imperceptibly modernized
in the rebuilding.
A good many of the women, old and young, continued to gamble furiously out
of their hours of work; but the majority of the girls did not. Those with
naturally serious minds were absorbed, uplifted, keen, calculating. They
did not even dance. They realized that they had wonderful futures in a
changing world. It was "up to them."
VII
Mortimer was beyond the draft age, but, possibly owing to his gallant
fearless appearance, it was rather expected that he would enlist.
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