'"
She did not tell him how she had mothered the lads. She was not much
older than some of them, but they had instinctively recognized the
maternal quality of her interest in them. With all her beauty they had
turned to her for that which was in a sense spiritual.
Hating the war, Drusilla yet loved the work she had to do. There was,
of course, the horror of it, but there was, too, the stimulus of living
in a world of realities. She wondered if she were the same girl who
had burned her red candles and had served her little suppers, safe and
sound and far away from the stress of fighting.
She wondered, too, if women over there were still thinking of their
gowns, and men of their gold. Were they planning to go North in the
summer and South in the winter? Were they still care-free and
comfortable?
People over here were not comfortable, but how little they cared, and
how splendid they were. She had seen since she came such incredibly
heroic things--men as tender as women, women as brave as men--she had
seen human nature at its biggest and best.
"I have never been religious," she told the Captain, earnestly; "our
family is the kind which finds sufficient outlet in a cool intellectual
conclusion that all's right with the world, and it doesn't make much
difference what comes hereafter.
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