The remainder of the summer found Thurley undecided as to what she should do next and not having Hortense as an aide-de-camp and with Polly still squandering her legacy, Thurley stayed in town to collect her faculties and study new rÔles.

She found that women were chattering about “finding the group spirit,” pointing with envy and emulation to the soldiers who had found “the group spirit” and were working together for the cause. The germ of unrest, masquerading under the altruistic title of “group spirit,” was prevalent among all the women Thurley knew and those of whom she heard.

Even Ernestine came to explain incoherently that she had cancelled the season’s engagements to sail for France—“to help”—anything that was needed, play or amuse or scrub floors, Thurley dear, and was noncommittal as to her disorganized interests at home or her personal qualifications to serve in this capacity. Thurley accepted Ernestine’s good-by with a sense of amusement. Thurley herself did not feel she was slacking although it would have been difficult to explain just why she did not. She, too, had brought the “blessed memory” with her from the hermitage, acting as ballast for the chaos which prevailed about her.

A feeling of age had also claimed her. She seemed to see beyond these struggling, enthusiastic but deluded women who were sincere in their efforts, yet forgetful that to serve one’s immediate circle of dependents is the best way in which to serve the larger cause. Thurley saw ahead to the psychological struggle taking place in one year, three, five—who knows?—when these restless spirits, suffering from repression of emotion or ennui had rushed pell mell with a bevy of excuses and accomplishments into the teeth of the fight and the fight had unexpectedly ceased and their adventure was at an end.

She did not try to argue with Ernestine to stay at home and when Mark came to say good-by, a few mornings later, saying he was to dance and give athletic drills overseas, she said very faintly,

“But is war a pink tea? If I were a soldier and I saw an able-bodied man dancing about in a toga to give an imitation of Greek handball, I’d ask him to get into the trenches with me or quit. After all, Mark, you are going because Lissa is going!”

“Lissa is after a duke,” Mark said lightly. “How about one of these floor-scrubbing duchesses? What about yourself? You might capture an earl,” drawing on his cream-colored kid gloves. “Fancy Bliss, who blew in yesterday fit as a fiddle, declaring he would stick along at the old game right here.”

Thurley’s face must have showed her joy.

“Oh-ho, so Lissa is right,” Mark laughed. “She always contended that it was Bliss whose word was law with you!”

Thurley put up her hands in protest and dismissed him, sending Lissa a good-by present and evading a possible interview. It did not seem as if she could endure these vapid persons who were rushing over to gain fame, excitement, copy or a worth-while matrimonial alliance! She saw, in truth, the result of Bliss Hobart’s words, that were the foundation of art of sterner stuff regarding personalities, these cluttery amateurs and intriguers would be, perforce, engaged in some industry and not foot-loose to follow the procession. The really great souls whose work would ennoble the cause could go forth unquestioned and certain of results.

The morning’s mail brought her consolation—a note from Collin, characteristically brief and with a pencil sketch of himself, very knock-kneed and bulging of eye, clad in uniform.

“Good boy,” Thurley said as she finished reading the note to Miss Clergy, “and I suppose Polly will march in with the Long Island Legion of Death behind her, making war on me if I dare to smile.”

“But you won’t have to stop singing, will you?” was all Miss Clergy answered. “There’ll be enough people left at home to listen to you?”

“I won’t stop,” Thurley promised gently, adding to herself, “my singing is Miss Clergy’s form of an ooze!”

She was wondering these days if, when she met Bliss Hobart again, the holiday at Blessed Memory would serve to bring them into closer understanding or if, as after so many other rare moments, there would follow a desultory friendship with the same harsh taskmaster and critic speaking no more of visions.

Later in the day he did call on her, the same elegantly dressed Mr. Public Opinion who was so besieged with patriotic duties and enterprises and enmeshed in a mass of detail regarding the reconstruction of grand opera, law suits impudently presented by dismissed Teutonic songbirds, the revival of English and French music and the possibility of a new prodigy, that he seemed to Thurley to be twin brother to the man who had played and worked and thought in the fashion of a hundred years ago—in a hundred-years-ago setting.

“Polly is busied with a surprise,” he told her, “a horrible war opera, I presume. No one seems able to convince her she is hopeless. And that ridiculous devil of a Collin has gone to fight, bless him, while Ernestine has fallen prey to war-madness which is besetting emotional and idle women and she will return with a new stock of morbidity—because she has tried to do something which she had no excuse for attempting.”

“What of Mark, Lissa, Hortense?” she persisted, laughing.

“Banish them from my thoughts—” he looked at her critically. “Yes, it did you good. Now that I’ve set the example, why not follow it? Find a wilderness and build a house in the middle of it. At eighty-two you’ll have the critics wrangling as to whether you are your own daughter!”

“Where shall I go?” she asked rather pointedly.

“Aha, you want to poach on my reserve? You can’t do it! Take your own home town; isn’t it wild in spots? Seems to me you used to say so. Take twenty acres and bury yourself in it. Do the things we did those four weeks.”

“Birge’s Corners!” So, he was to remain aloof. Birge’s Corners where she had returned in foolish triumph and ostentation—Dan and his son and Lorraine would be there, a harmonious trio! There was no place for her at Birge’s Corners.

“I’ll consider it,” was all she said.

“I came to tell you of Sam Sparling,” Hobart added in a gentler tone. “Evidently you have not heard?”

She shook her head.

“It happened while we were away. Had a nervous collapse—a stroke as well, and was battered up for keeps—all one side. Seems he had tossed his money around without thought and he was left stony broke. So they gave him a royal London benefit. The war paused long enough to honor the old chap. People came hours before the performance and waited on street curbs, brought their lunch and all that. A stall was as hard to get the day of the performance as a slice of the moon. Baxter says it was as great an event in its particular way as a coronation. They all turned out, great and small, old and young, to give Sam a valedictory. And now blush, Thurley. They even had your voice on a talking machine singing, ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes,’ and it was encored! There, doesn’t that set you up? I can’t tell you the exact programme, but every great artist available appeared. There was every one from a coster singer to the finest Shakespearean artist. And then the curtain rose for the finale—all the artists were in tiers and dressed in evening costume. Up high on a sort of throne sat our Sam, weak and not quite resigned yet to the truth of what had happened but gamey old Sam in a tuxedo and a gardenia in his buttonhole! The house burst into one sobbing roar—for he was their Sam Sparling and they were going to prove it.”

“What did he do? Oh, why weren’t we there?” Thurley cried.

“First, the house sang the street gamin song Sam had sung when a lad, a catchy tune with a refrain of,

“He used to do a clog dance with it and have that laugh of his thrown in for good value. Well, the people forgot his Shakespearean triumphs and his drama work; they just sang the old song between their laughing and crying. Then two men helped Sam to half stand, a terrible effort for the dear old chap, but the house rewarded him,—they sobbed louder than ever. All Sam said was, with an echo of the old street gamin laugh, ‘Thank ’ee, sirs’—and then he fell back—dead! The excitement was too much ... and the money will go to the soldiers.”

“But that,” said Bliss, after Thurley managed to stop sobbing, “isn’t the thing that hurts the worst. That was a superb ending—just as Sam himself would have staged it. But the very next day, the leading daily announced they would run a series entitled ‘Sam Sparling’s Breach of Promise Suits’ as told by an ‘old beau’—and there you have what I’ve said in a nutshell—the wrong the man Sparling did to his better self living after him, the good forgotten, undervalued. All due to the present day system of advertising and standards for artists’ personalities.”

“What will it be after the war?” Thurley added.

“It will be the duty of every person to discriminate between the army, whether military, spiritual or mental, which has won the cause and what I name the jumblers-in, emotional hoboes who have profiteered or indulged in mental orgies or distorted patriotism in order to market inferior wares—” He was about to say more when Miss Clergy came in, her sharp eyes looking at Thurley’s tear-stained cheeks. Being a mere man, Hobart fled!