These stories may be true. I don't know. Only these same magazines print stories that have a brave fireman in the picture carrying a fainted girl down his ladder through the flames, and if you believed them you'd also believe they had to set a tenement house on fire every time a fireman wants to get married. And that don't stand to reason. Mebbe the other stories don't either.
But what about the other side of these same stories? What about the village good boy that goes through war's purifying flame and comes back home to be the town tough? Ain't it time someone showed up the moral ravages war commits on our best young men?
Me? I just had a talk lately with a widowed mother down to Red Gap and what this beastly war has done to her oldest boy--well, if she could of looked ahead she would of let the world go right on being unsafe even for Republicans. She poured her heart out to me. She is Mrs. Arline Plunkett, one of the sweetest, gentlest mothers that ever guarded a son from every evil influence. And then to see it all go whoosh! The son's name was Shelley Plunkett, or it was until he went out into the world to make a name for himself. He is now largely known as Bugs Plunkett. I leave it to you if a nice mother would relish having her boy make that name for himself. And after all the pains she'd took with his moral development from the cradle up--till he run away from home on account of his curls!
Arline had been left well-off by her husband, who was president of the Drovers' Trust Company, and her home was about the most refined home in Red Gap, having full bookcases and pictures of foreign Catholic churches--though Arline is a Presbyterian--and metal statues of antique persons, male and female, and many articles of adornment that can't be had for the ordinary trading stamps. She lived, of course, only for her two boys, Shelley and Keats. Keats being an infant didn't require much living for, but Shelley was old enough to need a lot of it.
He was eight years old when I first seen him, with long golden curls to his shoulders and lace on his velvet pants. He came in when I was calling on his ma and acted the perfect little gentleman. He was so quiet and grown-up he made me feel right awkward. He had the face of a half-growed angel framed in these yellow curls, and his manners was them of Sir Galahad that he read stories about. He was very entertaining this day. His mother had him show me a portrait of himself and curls that had been printed in a magazine devoted to mothers and watermelon-rind pickles, and so forth, and he also brought me the new book his pastor had presented him with on his eighth birthday.