Dangerous Days

For the first time he was beginning to think of Clayton as a man, rather

than a father.

Not that all of this was coherently thought out. It was a series of

impressions, outgrowth of his own beginning development and of his own

uneasiness.

He wondered, too, about Rodney Page. He seemed to be always around,

underfoot, suave, fastidious, bowing Natalie out of the room and

in again. He had deplored the war until he found his attitude

unfashionable, and then he began, with great enthusiasm, to arrange

pageants for Red Cross funds, and even to make little speeches, graceful

and artificial, patterned on his best after-dinner manner.

Graham was certain that he supported his mother in trying to keep him at

home, and he began to hate him with a healthy young hate. However, late

in April, he posed in one of the pageants, rather ungraciously, in

a khaki uniform. It was not until the last minute that he knew that

Delight Haverford was to be the nurse bending over his prostrate figure.

He turned rather savage.

"Rotten nonsense," he said to her, "when they stood waiting to be posed.

"Oh, I don't know. They're rather pretty."

"Pretty! Do you suppose I want it be pretty?"

"Well, I do," said Delight, calmly.

"It's fake. That's what I hate. If you were really a nurse, and was

really in uniform--! But this parading in somebody else's clothes, or

stuff hired for the occasion--it's sickening."

Delight regarded him with clear, appraising eyes.

"Why don't you get a uniform of your own, then?" she inquired. She

smiled a little.

He never knew what the effort cost her. He was pale and angry, and his

face in the tableau was so set that it brought a round of applause. With

the ringing down of the curtain he confronted her, almost menacingly.

"What did you mean by that?" he demanded. "We've hardly got into this

thing yet."

"We are in it, Graham."

"Just because I don't leap into the first recruiting office and beg them

to take me--what right have you got to call me a slacker?"

"But I heard--"

"Go on!"

"It doesn't matter what I heard, if you are going."

"Of course I'm going," he said, truculently.

He meant it, too. He would get Anna settled somewhere--she had begun

to mend--and then he would have it out with Marion and his mother. But

there was no hurry. The war would last a long time. And so it was that

Graham Spencer joined the long line of those others who had bought a

piece of ground, or five yoke of oxen, or had married a wife.