"Don't leave me, Edwin! Baby darling, don't leave me! I'm alone! I'm afraid."
"There, there, little mother," he said, patting at her and blinking, "I--Why--why, there's men come back from every war, and plenty of them. Good Lord! just because a fellow goes to the front, he--"
"I got nothing left. Everything I've worked for has slipped through my life like sand through a sieve. My hands are empty. I've lost your father on the success I slaved for. I'm losing my boy on the fine ideas and college education I've slaved for. I--Don't leave me, Edwin. I'm afraid--Don't--"
"Mother--I--Don't be cut up about it. I--"
"Why should I give to this war? I ain't a fine woman with the fine ideas you learn at college. I ask so little of life--just some one who needs me, some one to do for. I 'ain't got any fine ideas about a son at war. Why should I give to what they're fighting for on the other side of the ocean? Don't ask me to give up my boy to what they're fighting for in a country I've never seen--my little boy I raised--my all I've got--my life! No! No!"
"It's the women like you, mother--with guts--with grit--that send their sons to war."
"You're going to have your hands so full, little mother, taking care of the Army and Navy, keeping their feet dry and their chests warm, that before you know it you'll be down at the pier some fine day watching us fellows come home from victory."
"You're going to coddle the whole fighting front, making 'em sweaters and aviation sets out of a whole ton of wool I'm going to lay in the house for you. Time's going to fly for my little mother."
"You wouldn't have me a quitter, little mother. You wouldn't have the other fellows in my crowd at college go out and do what I haven't got the guts to do. You want me to hold up my head with the best of 'em."
"Us college men got to be the first to show that the fighting backbone of the country is where it belongs. If us fellows with education don't set the example, what can we expect from the other fellows? Don't ask me to be a quitter, mother. I couldn't! I wouldn't! My country needs us, mother--you and me--"
She lay back her head, laughing, crying, sobbing, choking.
"O God--take him and bring him back--to me!"
On a day when sky and water were so identically blue that they met in perfect horizon, the S. S. _Rowena_, sleek-flanked, mounted fore and aft with a pair of black guns that lifted snouts slightly to the impeccable blue, slipped quietly, and without even a newspaper sailing-announcement into a frivolous midstream that kicked up little lace edged wavelets, undulating flounces of them. A blur of faces rose above deck-rails, faces that, looking back, receded finally. The last flag and the last kerchief became vapor. Against the pier-edge, frantically, even perilously forward, her small flag thrust desperately beyond the rail, Mrs. Ross, who had lost a saving sense of time and place, leaned after that ship receding in majesty, long after it had curved from view.