accepted as a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society
was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that
the possession of money and leisure necessarily undermined all that
was excellent in human nature. Perhaps a little to her
disappointment, she had soon discovered how grotesque and ignorant
this play-and-book idea was. She had returned from her honeymoon in
November of the first year of the war and had been astonished to
find that nearly all the well-known women whose names, in the public
imagination, were associated with decadence and irresponsibility,
were as a matter of fact devoted to Red Cross work and allied war
charities; that the majority of the men who were popularly supposed
to be killing time with ingenious wickedness worked as hard as the
average downtown merchant, and that even the debutantes newly burst
upon the world had, for the most part, banded themselves together as
a junior war-relief society and were turning out weekly an immense
number of bandages for the wounded soldiers of France and England.
Young men of high and gallant spirit, who bore the old names of New
York, had disappeared without a line of publicity--to be heard of
later as members of the already famous Escadrille or as ambulance
workers on the Western front. Beautiful girls had slipped quietly
away from their usual haunts, touched by a deep and rare emotion, to
work in Allied hospitals three thousand miles and more away--if not
as full-blown nurses, then as scullery maids or motor drivers.

There were, of course, the Oldershaws and the Marie Littlejohns and
the Christine Hurleys and the rest. Alice had met and watched them
throwing themselves against any bright light like all silly moths.
And there were the girls like Joan, newly released from the exotic
atmosphere of those fashionable finishing schools which no sane
country should permit. But even these wild and unbroken colts and