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herself that she had not known she had, not only the physical endurance to be on her feet all day, but a well of compassion beyond tears. She who wept so easily at the beauty of a fish hawk’s flight or a grand poem did not have tears in her eyes as she washed and ministered to the dying. She was strangely happy in the simple concentration of transfusing something like love, a love she could understand and could give.
    Cousin Philip had stopped scolding her now for being there. “You are doing a good job, Jane. Even the nurses are grateful.”
    â€œThere’s so little one can do,” she said pushing her hair back and standing straight for a second, a relief after all the stooping.
    â€œYou Reids have a lot of stamina. Your mother is quite amazing.”
    Three weeks before, praise from stern Cousin Philip would have delighted her. Now it didn’t seem to matter. She was beyond anything as personal as that. How infinitely far away tennis parties and dances had become! Even the island seemed a little unreal. And when it was over Jane Reid knew that those things would remain precious, but she had to find a way to live that would involve and use the whole of her.
    And when Pappa returned, dismayed to find his wife thinner and looking extremely tired, and Jane a little withdrawn and somehow older, they talked about it, “I can’t see why you have to exhaust yourself to feel that life is real, life is earnest,” he teased.
    â€œOh Papa, if you had seen how people struggle to live, even very old people—and then how at a certain moment they are ready to die. Something happens, and there is a look on their faces … perfect peace. I’ll never be afraid of death again.”
    â€œTell us about St. Paul, dear.…” Allegra, back to normal, deliberately changed the subject. Jane was becoming a little too intense, and besides, their experience had gone too deep to be discussed, she felt. They had done what they needed to, and now it was over. The hospital had been reorganized and qualified nurses brought in, but people were still dying like flies. Prayer seemed more appropriate to Allegra than talking about oneself, and this reaction was entirely characteristic. Jane went up to her room, feeling at a loose end. There she read and reread a letter from Lucy in Philadelphia. Lucy was working at the Red Cross but quite dissatisfied with her job of organizing volunteers to roll bandages and knit socks and sweaters and woolen caps: “I wish I could find some way to deal more directly with people, Reedy. Have you ever thought that when the war is over … and they say it can’t be long now … there will be enormous need for people to help in the rebuilding, and to take care of children? There will be so many orphans! Don’t you think we might go to France together and help somewhere, in an orphanage maybe?”
    Jane sat in the little rocker for a long time with the letter in her hand. France! The word itself. France had been a lodestar for so long—but could she afford a year away, not begin her life as a teacher as planned? Of course she could. At last the door was opening to something she could do, like the nursing, something really needed, acutely needed. And to do it with Lucy, quiet, steadfast, imaginative Lucy whom she loved as much as anyone in her own family, her chosen friend. It seemed almost too good to be true. The only awful thing was that they would have to wait a year or more … God knows how long!
    It would be a very long year of disasters, learned of through the newspapers and in letters from soldiers in France, a year in which President Wilson turned the United States from peace to war, and in doing so had to sabotage his own pleas for tolerance as the propaganda machine in Washington went into full gear and hatred of the Hun swept the country. Submarine warfare was sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping and the holocaust in the