have to take their stand shortly. I couldn't bear it if a son of mine
were a slacker."

She tossed out her hands. "Slacker! Don't dare say it of my boy!"

The hideous word followed her. That night, when she lay in bed and
looked out into the moonlit wood, and saw the pines swaying like giant
fans across a pulsing, pale sky, and listened to the summer wind blowing
through the tall heads of them, again through the peace of it the word
stabbed. A slacker! She set to work to fancy how it would be if Brock
and Hugh both went to war and were both killed. She faced the thought.
Life--years of it--without Brock and Hugh! She registered that steadily
in her mind. Then she painted to herself another picture, Brock and Hugh
not going to war, at home ignominiously safe. Other women's sons
marching out into the danger--men, heroes! Brock and Hugh explaining,
steadily explaining why they had not gone! Brock and Hugh after the war,
mature men, meeting returning soldiers, old friends who had borne the
burden and heat, themselves with no memories of hideous, infinitely
precious days, of hardships, and squalid trench life, and deadly
pain--for America! Brock and Hugh going on through life into old age
ashamed to hold up their heads and look their comrades in the eye! Or
else--it might be--Brock and Hugh lying next year, this year, in
unknown, honored graves in France! Which was worse? And the aching heart
of the woman did not wait to answer. Better a thousand times brave death
than a coward's life. She would choose so if she knew certainly that she
sent them both to death. The education of the war, the new glory of
patriotism, had already gone far in this one woman.

And then the thought stabbed again--a slacker--Hugh! How did his father
dare say it? A poisonous terror, colder than the fear of death, crawled