You kidded them at first: "Well, believe me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone goose already."

"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright an' save you wastin' bullets."

There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid him good-by. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suit cases and their pasteboard boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their young heads sticking out of the car windows in clusters-black, yellow, brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:

"Goo'-by! Goo'-by! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a week, for a visit. Goo'-by! Goo-"

HEY were gone. Their voices THEY

came back to the crowd on the depot platform-high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children, shouting.

Well, you wrote letters; fat bulging letters, and in turn you received equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable forms of cake.

Continued from page 11

But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in

phrases such as "I sez t' him" and "He sez t' me." They wasted little conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.

NGIE HATTON, home from the

ΑΝ

East, was writing letters too. Everyone in Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed-looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator. They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere in the East. These letters were not from him.

Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue shop was the society shop. The East End crowd sewed there, capped, veiled, aproned-and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft, your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not belong to the East End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled and folded them was pure cerulean. Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin' bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing it in time for a Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might have been invaluable. It never was asked.

"C'n you speak French?"

Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in it too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then, inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and I've traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make Hatton's place look sick."

The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around. Well, I should say not!

They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or their father's or a neighbor boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy."

Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they giggled and shrieked and ran.

WITHOUT warning Chuck came home on three

"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a rube, but I ain't a fool." She was perilously near to tears.

"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knewif you knew-a guy's got to-he's got no right to-"

And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She smiled and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes or the army. It was something else--an ease of manner, a new leisureliness of glance, an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee over Labor Day. It was the extent of her experience as a traveler. She remembered how superior she had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York! France! It wasn't the distance that terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could not have put it into words.

THEY

HEY went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some of the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it with little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an expression indicative of extreme disgust.

"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it manfully. "That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains-sulphur and iron and so forth."

"I don't care," snapped Tessie irritably. "I hate it!" They had often walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse and drifted down the lovely Fox River.

"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do."

"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you do it."

Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than ever against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a little as he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the warm red skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll be ready in a minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt in at the throat, so that you saw the white, clean line of his untanned chest in strange contrast to his sunburnt throat. A feeling of giddy faintness surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and would have fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there! Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk along the middle." She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do that. I never did before."

Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I guess I must have dreamed about this more'n a million times."

"Have you, Chuck?"

They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play baseball and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are wonders!"

"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about something else?"

He saw that he had blundered, without in the least understanding how or why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission.

"About-you." Tessie made it a caress.

"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and marchin' and readin' someOh, say, what d'you think?"

"What?"

"They been learnin' us-teachin' us. I mean

ques

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I do?"

It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in France, Bullets and bayonets, Would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it sure. He'd make it there and back, all

right. But he-he'd be a different

Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel, French, girls, swell folksAnd all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in the water. Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box." "Chocolate cake."

"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this morning." "Yes, you did!"

"Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can't do anything, the way you talk."

"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think."

"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else."

"Fried chicken!"

"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it." She pouted prettily.

"You asked me to, didn't you?" Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty.

Down the river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden among the trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and Sundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, not just a couple of days out of the whole year." She hesitated a moment. "I suppose it looks like a shanty to you now."

Chuck surveyed it patronizingly. "No, it's a nice little place." They beached their boat, and built

a little fire, and had supper on the river bank, and Tessie picked out the choice bits for him-the breast of the chicken, beautifully golden brown; the ripest tomato; the firmest, juiciest pickle; the corner of the little cake which would give him a double share of icing. She may not have been versed in French, Tessie, but she was wise in feminine wiles.

DOWN OWN the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with Tessie pretending fear just for the joy of havThen back again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. And so up the hill homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand on rer arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, they would have been something like this: "Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you. I wouldn't care if only I had you.

ng Chuck reassure her.

stuck on one of those French girls. I should worry! They say wages at the watch factory are going to be raised, workers are so scarce. I'll prob'ly be as rich as Angie Hatton time you get back."

And he, miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck. I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don't like their jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em, last week, a fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair is all funny, and fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark like foreigners. Nix!"

Th

had been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. Which brings us to the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little point to gical,

downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town. The husband, very wet as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the gocart outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading at Ding's or Halpin's. Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen gocarts outside Halpin's, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, fat-cheeked. The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed largely. "Hello, Ed. Th' woman's inside, buyin' the store out, I guess.' "Tha' so? Mine too. Well, how's everything?"

Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available by the more important sleeping bundle-two yards of goods; a spool of 100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the Five-and-Ten.

There had been a time when Tessie, if she thought of these women at all, had felt sorry for them; worn, drab, lacking in style and figure. Now she envied them. For the maternal may be strong at twenty.

THERE were weeks upon weeks when

no letter came from Chuck. In his last letter there had been some talk of his being sent to Russia. Tessie's eyes, large enough now in her thin face, distended with a great fear. Russia! His letter spoke, too, of French villages and châteaux. He and a bunch of fellows had been introduced to a princess or a countess or something-it was all one to Tessie-and what do you think? She had kissed them all on both cheeks! Seems that's the way they did in France.

The morning after the receipt of this letter the girls at the watch factory might have remarked her pallor had they not been so occupied with a new and more absorbing topic.

"Tess, did you hear about Angie Hatton?"

"What about her?"

"She's going to France. It's in the Milwaukee paper, all about her being Chippewa's fairest daughter, and a picture of the house, and her being the belle of the Fox River Valley, and she's giving up her palatial home and all to go to work in a Y. M. C. A. canteen for her country and bleeding France."

"Ya-as she is!" sneered Tessie, and a dull red flush, so deep as to be painful, swept over her face from throat to brow. "Ya-as she is, the doll-faced

simp! Why, say, she never wiped up a floor in her life, or baked a cake, or stood on them feet of hers. She couldn't cut up a loaf of bread decent. Bleedin'

She thrust her chin out brutally, and

you want, like Angie, why, you gotta take second choice.'

All that day, at the bench, she was the reckless, insolent, audacious Tessie of six months ago. Nap Ballou was always standing over her, pretending to inspect some bit of work or other, his shoulder brushing hers. She laughed up

at him so that her face was not more than two inches from his. He flushed, but she did not. She laughed a reckless little laugh.

"Thanks for helpin' teach me my trade, Mr. Ballou. 'Course I only been at it over three years now, so I ain't got the hang of it yet."

He straightened up slowly, and as he did so he rested a hand on her shoulder for a brief moment. She did not shrug it off.

THAT night, after supper, Tessie put on her hat and strolled down to Park Avenue. It wasn't for the walk. Tessie had never been told to exercise systematically for her body's good, or her mind's. She went in a spirit of unwholesome, brooding curiosity and a bitter resentment. Going to France, was she? Lots of good she'd do there. Better stay home and-and what? Tessie cast about in her mind for a fitting job for Angie. Guess she might's well go, after all. Nobody'd miss her, unless it was her father, and he didn't see her but about a third of the time. But in Tessie's heart was a great envy for this girl who could bridge the hideous waste of ocean that separated her from her man. Bleedin' France. Yeh! Joke!

The Hatton place, built and landscaped twenty years before, occupied a square block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. In architectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle, French château, and Rhenish Schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about its façade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of landed magnificence.

Tessie, walking slowly past it, and peering through the high iron fence, could not help noting an air of unwonted excitement about the place, usually so aloof, so coldly serene. Automobiles standing out in front. People going up and down. They didn't look very cheerful. Just as if it mattered whether anything happened to her or not!

Tessie walked around the block and stood a moment, uncertainly. Then she struck off down Grand Avenue and past Donovan's pool shack. A little group

of after-supper idlers stood outside, smoking and gossiping, as she knew there would be. As she turned the corner she saw Nap Ballou among them. She had known that too. As she passed she looked straight ahead, without bowing. But just past the Burke House he caught up to her. No half shy "Can I walk home with you?" from Nap Ballou. No. Instead: "Hello, sweetheart!"

"Hello yourself."

"Somebody's looking mighty pretty this evening, all dolled up in pink." "Think so?"

She tried to be pertly indifferent, but it was good to have some one following, some one walking home with you. What if he was old enough to be her father, with graying hair? Lots of the movie heroes had graying hair at the sides. Twenty craves some one to tell it how wonderful it is. And Nap Ballou told her.

They walked for an hour. Tessie left him at the corner. She had once heard her father designate Ballou as "that drunken skunk." When she entered the sitting room her cheeks held an unwonted pink. Her eyes were brighter than they had been in months. Her mother looked up quickly, peering at her over a pair of steel-rimmed spec

a mahogany table in the parlor, and all

the housework to do. I'm scared. I'm scared I won't get it. What'll I do if

I don't?"

over there after that fella of hers. She's chasin' him. It's now or never, and she knows it and she's scared, same's the rest of us. On'y we got to

And he, wordlessly: "Will you wait set home and make the best of it.

Or take what's left." She turned her head

for me, Tessie, and keep on loving me and thinking of me? And will you slowly to where Nap Ballou stood over

Keep yourself clean in mind and body so that if I come back-"

a table at the far end of the room. She laughed a grim, unlovely little laugh.

Aloud, she said: "I guess you'll get "I guess when you can't go after what

"Where you been, Tessie?" "Oh, walkin"."

"Who with?” "Cora."

"Why, she was here, callin' for you, not more'n an hour ago."

Tessie, taking the hatpins out of her hat on her way upstairs, met this coolly. "Yeh, I ran into her comin' back." Upstairs, lying fully dressed on her

The other

hard little bed, she stared up into the darkness, thinking, her hands limp at her sides. Oh, well, what's the diff? You had to make the best of it. Everybody makin' a fuss about the soldiers: feedin' 'em, and askin' 'em to their houses, and sendin' 'em things, and givin' dances and picnics and parties Chuck so they wouldn't be lonesome. had told her all about it. boys told the same. They could just pick and choose their good times. Tessie's mind groped about, sensing a certain injustice. How about the girls? She didn't put it thus squarely. Hers was not a logical mind, trained to think. Easy enough to paw over the menfolks and get silly over brass buttons and a uniform. She put it that way. She thought of the refrain of a popular song: "What Are You Going to Do to Tessie, smiling a Help the Boys?" crooked little smile up there in the darkness, parodied the words deftly. "What're you going to do to help the girls?" she demanded. "What're you going to do-" She rolled over on one side and buried her head in her arms.

THE

HERE was news again next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first. But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world about her. The Chippewa "Courier" went into the newspaper pile behind the kitchen door without a glance from Tessie's incurious eye.

She was late this morning. As she sat down at the bench and fitted her glass in her eye the chatter of the others, pitched in the high key of unusual excitement, penetrated even her listlessness.

"An' they say she never screeched or fainted or anything. She stood there, kind of quiet, lookin' straight ahead, and then all of a sudden she ran to her pa-"

"Both comin' at once, like that-" "I feel sorry for her. She never did anything to me. She-"

Tessie spoke, her voice penetrating the staccato fragments all about her and gathering them into a whole. "Say, who's the heroine of this picture? Somebody flash me a cut-in so I can kinda follow the story. I come in in the middle of the reel, I guess."

They turned on her with the unlovely eagerness of those who have ugly news to tell. They all spoke at once, in short sentences, their voices high with the note of hysteria.

"Angie Hatton's beau was killed-" "They say his aireoplane fell ten thousan' feet-"

"The news come only last evenin' about eight-"

"She won't see nobody but her pa-" Eight! At eight Tessie had been standing outside Hatton's house, envying Angie and hating her. So that explained the people, and the automobiles, and the excitement. Tessie was not receiving the news with the dramatic reaction which its purveyors felt it deserved. Tessie, turning from one to the other quietly, had said nothing. She was pitying Angie. Oh, the luxury of it! Nap Ballou, coming in swiftly to still the unwonted commotion in work hours, found Tessie the only one quietly occupied in that chatter-filled room. She was smiling as she worked. Nap Ballou, bending over her on some pretense that deceived no one, spoke lowvoiced in her ear. But she veiled her eyes insolently and did not glance up. She hummed contentedly all the morning at her tedious work.

She had promised Nap Ballou to go picnicking with him Sunday. Down the river, boating, with supper on shore. The small, still voice within her had said: "Don't go! Don't go!" But the harsh, high-pitched, reckless overtone said: "Go on! Have a good time. Take all you can get."

She would have to lie at home, and she did it. Some fabrication about the girls at the watch works did the trick. Fried chicken, chocolate cake. She packed them deftly and daintily. Highheeled white kid shoes, flimsy blouse, rustling skirt. Nap Ballou was waiting