I + 

“Karo,” said Isabel, “is just as good as sugar. In case you can’t tell the difference.” + 

The morning sunshine was slanting in the wide dusty windows of the Chicago skyscraper. The big bare room was hung with Red Cross posters and filled with long deal tables and crowded with smartly dressed women. They sat, uncomfortably, on caterer’s folding chairs around the tables, meticulously pressing small squares of cheesecloth into intricately mitred rectangles. Isabel was working the bandage roller at the head of the first table. Muriel, at her elbow, looked up from her gauze sponges. + 

“But is it fattening?” she asked. + 

“Everything good is fattening,” said Isabel with a little sigh of resignation. + 

Jane smiled as she heard her. She knew that Isabel, at forty-six, did not really care much any longer if everything good was. But Muriel, at forty-one, still cared a great deal. She was constantly repressing a slightly Semitic tendency toward rounded curves. She was still awfully pretty, Jane thought. Her blue eye had never lost that trick of dancing. They were dancing now, as she responded lightly: + 

“The women of this country have done a great deal for Herbert Hoover. I think the least he can do for them is to offer a few reducing food substitutes.” + 

Isabel did not join in the laugh that went round the table. Jane knew that Isabel seriously deplored Muriel’s tendency to be frivolous about the war. Jack had been nine months in training now at Camp Brant in Rockford. Albert was there, too, of course. The boys had left Harvard together as soon as war was declared and had joined the first R.O.T.C. at Fort Sheridan. They would undoubtedly be shipped to France before the summer was over. + 

Isabel and Robin took the war very seriously. They were terribly worried about Jack. As far as they were concerned, it was just Jack’s war. Though he was still safely detailed to shoot machine guns over an Illinois prairie, Jane knew that Isabel was always thinking of him lying dead or wounded on a French battlefield. Every bandage she was rolling that morning in the big bare room on top of the Chicago skyscraper was turned out with a sense of personal service for her son. + 

Muriel was worried about Albert, too, of course. But she took a vicarious pride in his military exploits. She loved to have him gracing her Chicago drawing-room on his brief leaves from Camp Brant, looking decorative and dedicated and dapper in his second Lieutenant’s uniform. Albert Lancaster was a very beautiful young man and he was very fond of his mother. In the presence of Muriel’s other beautiful young men he always flirted with her, very flatteringly. Jane had sometimes felt that Muriel was just a little in love with him. She had said as much one day to Isabel at their mother’s luncheon-table. + 

“Now, Jane,” Isabel had responded airily, “don’t suggest that Muriel is going to add incest to her list of crimes!” + 

Mrs. Ward had said they should not talk like that. With Bert in the helpless condition he was, it was very natural for Muriel to centre her affections on her only son. + 

“If she only did!” had been Isabel’s telling comment. + 

Muriel had been very capable about the war, however, in spite of her frivolity. She had organized the Red Cross circle on top of the Chicago skyscraper. She had ordered the supplies and enrolled the workers and persuaded the owner of the skyscraper to give them the room rent free. She was a member of the countless Food Administration and National Council of Defence committees. + 

Nevertheless, Isabel deplored her frivolity. Muriel did not care. She just went on being frivolous. At the moment she was making airy little jokes about the sunny side of being a famine victim. + 

Jane soon ceased to listen. From her seat near the window she could look out over the roofs of the smaller office buildings toward the east, past the slender silhouette of the Montgomery Ward Tower, across the desert wastes of Grant Park, to the Illinois Central switchyards, where the miniature engines, dwarfed by distance, pulled their toy trains and belched their black smoke and puffed their white steam up into the serene face of the May sky. Beyond them stretched the sparkling blue plane that was the lake. + 

A lovely day, reflected Jane, idly. A lovely day, with a bright spring sun and a stiff east breeze to sweep the city clean. Her hands still busy mechanically folding her gauze sponges, she gazed up, blinking a little, at the golden orb that shone dazzlingly down on the city roofs above the gilded Diana that topped the Tower. What had that sun seen, she was thinking, since it had last sunk behind the murk of the stockyards, since she herself, staring from that same window, had watched its dying rays paint the Montgomery Ward Diana with rosy fire? The words of the Stevenson nursery rhyme she had so often repeated to the children, when they were little, came into her mind. + 

“The sun is not abed when I + 

At night upon my pillow lie, + 

But round the earth his way he takes + 

And morning after morning makes.” + 

One morning here on the Chicago lake front. A few hours earlier a very different one on the battlefields of France. The battlefields that would so soon swallow up Isabel’s Jack and Muriel’s Albert. But the battlefields that still, in May, 1918, almost four years after Jimmy’s death, achieved for Jane their major significance as Jimmy’s last resting-place. + 

Curious that Jimmy’s death had never made her realize the war. It had remained for her the supremely irrelevant accident that had killed him. An act of God, like a casual stroke of lightning. Or perhaps an act of man, like the blow of a death-dealing taxi, turning too quickly on a policeman’s whistle, to crush an absentminded pedestrian under its indifferent wheels. + 

Jimmy had not died for Germany, in spite of his Prussian helmet. He had not died for her, in spite of his love. He had died⁠—for fun, perhaps, as he had lived. Died true to his creed embraced in night school, in a supreme desire “to be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy.” Jimmy had died for Pater, as much as for anything! Strange end for a hedonist. + 

You grew accustomed to pain, thought Jane. You really did. Even to pain like hers over Jimmy, that was so sharp, so constant, so distinctly localized that she almost felt that it had an organic focus in her heart. You grew wise and philosophical about it. You generalized. You struggled for resignation. + 

In her struggles for resignation, Jane knew that she was sometimes guilty of the great injustice to Jimmy of wondering if it weren’t all better so. Better so, she tried to think she meant, because of Agnes and little Agnes, who were living on the proceeds of Agnes’s third play so much more comfortably with Jimmy’s memory than they could ever have lived in his restless, unhappy presence. Jane tried to think she meant that, but really she knew she was thinking only of herself and of the intolerable problems a future, with or without a living Jimmy, had propounded. + 

For death had given her Jimmy. He had died loving her. He had died with that love unsullied and unspoiled. Would he have lived to love her always? Few men were capable of that. Would she have lived to see him grow indifferent, remote, concerned, perhaps, oh, vitally concerned! with some other woman? Now he was hers forever. The future held no fears. Time, changing relationships, distance, estrangement⁠—all these were powerless. She could dismiss that fearful question as to whether she had ever really, in her secret heart, wanted Jimmy to go back to Agnes. She could dismiss her vague forebodings on the world of women that waited for him if he didn’t. She could dismiss the thought of Stephen. You could love the dead without disloyalty to the living. + 

Nevertheless, it was an act of treachery to Jimmy’s memory to allow herself to think, even for a moment, that he was better dead. Jimmy⁠—dead. The thought was still incredible. She had never lost the illusion of his laughing, living presence. He was the constant companion of her reveries. He would be laughing now, if he could read her thoughts. Laughing at her involuntary sense of guilt. “Invincible innocent!” would be his ironical comment. You could not shock Jimmy. And he always mocked you when you shocked yourself. Jimmy would be the first to advance the consoling theory that he had made everything much easier for everyone by passing, so opportunely, out of the picture. He would have prided himself on the felicitous gesture. He would have admired his romantic role. + 

Yet Jimmy had not wanted to die. He had said as much, very definitely, in that last letter he had written her. Not that he hoped much from the future. But he had no fear of it. Jimmy accepted life on its face value. He lived for the moment. + 

Sudden death. At thirty-five. Before you knew the answer to any of life’s riddles. Perhaps you never knew that, though. Perhaps there was no answer. Perhaps all lives, at any age, ended like Jimmy’s on an unresolved chord. What difference did it make, anyway, once you were safely dead? It did not make any difference, if you had played the game and had done what you had to do and had never really regretted it. + 

But there was the pain at your heart that made you keep on thinking. Thinking, in spite of Stephen, whom you loved, and the children, whom you adored, and all the little practical things you had to do every day, like folding sponges for the Red Cross. + 

Why couldn’t she feel the war more keenly? With the maps still hung on the living-room wall and Stephen immersed in Liberty Loan campaigns, and Jack and Albert always about the house on their leaves from Camp Brant, and Cicily and Jenny and Isabel’s little Belle out every day in Red Cross uniforms, feeding hot dogs and coffee to the entrained doughboys at the canteens in the city switchyards? + 

They felt the war keenly enough⁠—Cicily and Jenny and little Belle. They were all eager to go to France with the boys from Camp Brant. Cicily wanted to drive an ambulance. Underage, thank Heaven! She and Stephen would not have to face that problem. Uncle Sam, a less yielding relation than two indulgent parents, could be relied upon to keep the girls at home. Yes, ignoble but consoling thought, with little Steve still only fourteen the war could not touch her immediate family. + 

Isabel was talking of Crisco, now. She was saying it could never take the place of butter. + 

Jane rose from her seat abruptly. She had promised to meet Cicily at Marshall Field’s at noon. They were going to look for a new evening gown. Jack and Albert were coming down for the next weekend. Cicily and Belle were planning a party. + 