"I daresay it isn't serious. He is always in love with somebody."
"There's a good bit of talk. I don't give a hang for either of them, but
I'm fond of Clayton. So are you. Natalie's out in the country now,
and Rodney is there every week-end. It's a scandal, that's all. As for
Natalie herself, she ought to be interned as a dangerous pacifist. She's
a martyr, in her own eyes. Thank heaven there aren't many like her."
Audrey leaned back against her pillows.
"I wonder, Terry," she said, "if you haven't shown me what to do next. I
might be able to reach some of the women like Natalie. There are some of
them, and they've got to learn that if they don't stand behind the men,
we're lost."
"Fine!" he agreed. "Get 'em to knit less and write more letters,
cheerful letters. Tell 'em to remember that by the time their man gets
the letter the baby's tooth will be through. There are a good many
men in the army-camps to-day vicariously cutting teeth. Get after 'em,
Audrey! A worried man is a poor soldier."
After he had gone, she had the nurse bring her paper and pencil, and she
wrote, rather incoherently, it is true, her first appeal to the women of
the country. It was effective, too. Audrey was an effective person.
When Clayton came for his daily visit she had just finished it, and was
reading it over with considerable complacency.
"I've become an author, Clay," she said, "I think myself I'm terribly
good at it. May I read it to you?"
He listened gravely, but with a little flicker of amusement in his
eyes. How like her it was, to refuse to allow herself even time to get
entirely well! But when she finished he was thoughtful. She had called
it "Slacker Women." That was what Natalie was; he had never put it into
words before. Natalie was a slacker.
He had never discussed Natalie's attitude toward the war with Audrey. He
rather thought she was entirely ignorant of it. But her little article,
glowing with patriotism, frank, simple, and convincing, might have been
written to Natalie herself.
"It is very fine," he said. "I rather think you have found yourself at
last. There aren't a lot of such women and I daresay they will be fewer
all the time. But they exist, of course."
She glowed under his approval.
There was, in all their meetings, a sub-current of sadness, that they
must be so brief, that before long they must end altogether, that they
could not put into words the things that were in their eyes and their
hearts. After that first hour of her return to consciousness there had
been no expressed tenderness between them. The nurse sat in the room,
eternally knitting, and Clayton sat near Audrey, or read to her, or,
like Terry, wandered about the room. But now and then Audrey, enthroned,
like a princess on her pillows, would find his eyes on her, and such
a hungry look in them that she would clench her hands. And after
such times she always said: "Now, tell me about the mill." Or about
Washington, where he was being summoned with increasing frequency. Or
about Graham. Anything to take that look out of his eyes. He told her
all his plans; he even brought the blue-prints of the new plant and
spread them out on the bed. He was dreaming a great dream those days,
and Audrey knew it. He was building again, this time not for himself,
but for the nation.