Brock, then fourteen, was in the house alone, quiet, his fresh, dear
face red with tears, and a black necktie of his father's, too large for
him, tied under his collar. Of all the memories of her boys, that
grotesque black tie was the most poignant and most precious. It said
much. It said: "I also, O, my mother, am of my people. I have a right to
their sorrows as well as to their joys, and if you do not give me my
place in trouble, I shall do what I can alone, being but a boy. I shall
give up play, and I shall wear mourning as I can, not knowing how very
well, but pushed by all my being to be with my own in their mourning."

Quickly affection for the other lad asserted itself. Brock and Hugh were
different, but Hugh was a dear boy, too--undeveloped, that was all. He
had never taken life seriously, little Hugh, and now that this war-cloud
hung over the world, he simply refused to look at it; he turned away his
face. That was all, a temperament which loved harmony and shrank from
ugliness; these things were young Hugh's limitations, and no ignoble
quality.

In a long dream, yet much faster than the words have told it, in
comprehensive flashes of memory, her elbows on her knees and her face,
in her slender hands, looking out over the garden with its arched way of
roses, with its high hedge, looking past the loveliness that was home to
the city pulsing in summer heat, to the shining zigzag of river beyond
the city, the woman reviewed her boys' lives. Boys were not now merely
one phase of humanity; they had suddenly become the nation. They stood
in the foreground of a world crisis; back of them America was ranged,
orderly, living and moving to feed, clothe, and keep happy these
millions of lads holding in their hands the fate of the earth. Her boys
were but two, yet necessary. She owed them to the country, as other
mothers of men.