"Three years," Sara Lee reflected. "By that time--"
The house was very quiet and still those days. There was an interlude
of emptiness and order, of long days during which Aunt Harriet
alternately grieved and planned, and Sara Lee thought of many things.
At the Red Cross meetings all sorts of stories were circulated; the
Belgian atrocity tales had just reached the country, and were spreading
like wildfire. There were arguments and disagreements. A girl named
Schmidt was militant against them and soon found herself a small island
of defiance entirely surrounded by disapproval. Mabel Andrews came once
to a meeting and in businesslike fashion explained the Red Cross
dressings and gave a lesson in bandaging. Forerunner of the many
first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel's, and made memorable
by one thing she said.
"You might as well all get busy and learn to do such things," she stated
in her brisk voice. "One of our internes is over there, and he says
we'll be in it before spring."
After the meeting Sara Lee went up to Mabel and put a hand on her arm.
"Are you going?" she asked.
"Leaving day after to-morrow. Why?"
"I--couldn't I be useful over there?"
Mabel smiled rather grimly. "What can you do?"
"I can cook."
"Only men cooks, my dear. What else?"
"I could clean up, couldn't I? There must be something. I'd do
anything I could. Don't they have people to wash dishes and--all that?"
Mabel was on doubtful ground there. She knew of a woman who had been
permitted to take over her own automobile, paying all her expenses and
buying her own tires and gasoline.
"She carries supplies to small hospitals in out-of-the-way places," she
said. "But I don't suppose you can do that, Sara Lee, can you?"
However, she gave Sara Lee a New York address, and Sara Lee wrote and
offered herself. She said nothing to Aunt Harriet, who had by that time
elected to take Edgar's room at Cousin Jennie's and was putting Uncle
James' clothes in tearful order to send to Belgium. After a time she
received a reply.
"We have put your name on our list of volunteers," said the letter,
"but of course you understand that only trained workers are needed now.
France and England are full of untrained women who are eager to help."
It was that night that Sara Lee became engaged to Harvey.
Sara Lee's attitude toward Harvey was one that she never tried to analyze.
When he was not with her she thought of him tenderly, romantically. This
was perhaps due to the photograph of him on her mantel. There was a dash
about the picture rather lacking in the original, for it was a profile,
and in it the young man's longish hair, worn pompadour, the slight thrust
forward of the head, the arch of the nostrils,--gave him a sort of tense
eagerness, a look of running against the wind. From the photograph
Harvey might have been a gladiator; as a matter of fact he was a bond
salesman.