Tom Cameron came home on a furlough from the officers' training camp the
day that the boys of the first draft departed from Cheslow. It stabbed
the hearts of many mothers and fathers with a quick pain to see him
march through the street so jaunty and debonair.
"Why, Tommy!" his sister cried. "You're a _man!_"
"Lay off! Lay off!" begged her twin, not at all pleased. "You might have
awakened to the fact that I was out of rompers some years ago. Your
eyesight has been bad."
Indeed, he was rather inclined to ignore her and "flock with his
father," as Helen put it to Ruth. The father and son had something in
common now that the girl could not altogether understand. They sat
before the cold grate in the library, their chairs drawn near to each
other, and smoked sometimes for an hour without saying a word.
"But, Ruthie," Helen said, her eyes big and moist, "each seems to know
just what the other is thinking about. Sometimes papa says a word, and
sometimes Tom; and the other nods and there is perfect understanding.
It--it's almost uncanny."
"I think I know what you mean," said the more observant girl of the Red
Mill. "We grew up some time ago, Helen. And you know we have rather
thought of Tom as a boy, still.
"But he is a man now. There is a difference in the sexes in their
attitude to this war which should establish in all our minds that we are
not equal."
"Who aren't equal?" demanded Helen, almost wrathfully, for she was a
militant feminist.
"Men and women are not equal, dear. And they never will be. Wearing
mannish clothes and doing mannish labor will never give women the same
outlook upon life that men have. And when men encourage us to believe
that our minds are the same as theirs, they do it almost always for
their own selfish ends--or because there is something feminine about
their minds."
"Traitor!" cried Helen.
"No," sighed Ruth. "Only honesty.
"Tom and his father understand each other's thoughts and feelings as you
and your father never could. After all, in the strongest association
between father and daughter there is the barrier of sex that cannot be
surmounted. You know yourself, Helen, that at a certain point you
consider your father much of a big boy and treat him accordingly. That,
they tell us, is the 'mother instinct' in the female, and I guess it is.
"On the other hand, I have seen girls and their mothers together (we
never had mothers after we were little kiddies, Helen, and we've missed
it) but I have seen such perfect understanding and appreciation between
mothers and their daughters that it was as though the same soul dwelt in
two bodies."
Helen sniffed in mingled scorn and doubt over Ruth's philosophy. Then
she said in an aggrieved tone: "But papa and Tom ought not to shut me
out of their lives--even in a small way."
"The penalty of being a girl," replied Ruth, practically. "Tom doesn't
believe, I suppose, that girls would quite understand his manly
feelings," she added with a sudden elfish smile.
"Cat's foot!" ejaculated the twin, with scorn.
Tom Cameron, however, did not run altogether true to form if Ruth was
right in her philosophy. He had always been used to talking seriously at
times with Ruth, and during this furlough he found time to have a long
and confidential talk with the girl of the Red Mill. This might be the
only furlough he would have before sailing for France, for he had
already obtained his commission as second lieutenant.
There was an understanding between the young man and Ruth Fielding--an
unspoken and tacit feeling that they were "made for each other." They
were young. Ruth's thoughts had never dwelt much upon love and marriage.
She never looked on each man she met half-wonderingly as a possible
husband. She had never met any man with this feeling. Perhaps, in part,
that was, unconsciously to herself, because Tom had always been so a
part of her life and her thoughts. Lately, however, she had come to the
realization that if Tom should really ask her to marry him when his
education was completed and he was established in the world, the girl of
the Red Mill would be very likely to consider his offer seriously.
"Things aren't coming out just as we had planned, Ruth," the young man
said on this occasion. "I guess this war is going to knock a lot of
plans in the head. If it lasts several years, many of us fellows, if we
come through it safely, will feel that we are too old to go back to
college.
"Can you imagine a fellow who has spent months in the trenches, and has
done the things that the soldiers are having to do and to endure and to
learn over there--can you imagine his coming back here and going to
school again?"
"Oh, Tom! I suppose that is so. The returned soldier must feel vastly
older and more experienced in every way than men who have never heard
the bursting of shells and the rattle of machine guns. Oh, dear, Tommy!
Are we going to know you at all when you come back?"
"Maybe not," grinned Tom. "I may raise whiskers. Most of the poilus do,
I understand. But you could not really imagine a regiment of Uncle Sam's
soldiers that were not clean shaven."
"We want to see it all, too--Helen and I," Ruth said, sighing. "We are so
far away from the front."
"Goodness!" he exclaimed. "I should think you would be glad."
"But some women must go," Ruth told him gravely. "Why not us?"
"You---- Well, I don't know about you, Ruth. You seem somehow different. I
expect you could look out for yourself anywhere. But Helen hasn't got
your sense."
"Hear him!" gasped Ruth.
"It's true," he declared doggedly. "She hasn't. Father and I have talked
it over. Nell is crazy to go--and I tell father he would be crazy to let
her. But it may be that he will go to London and Paris himself, for
there is some work he can do for the Government. Of course, Helen would
insist upon accompanying him in that event."
"Oh, Tom!" exclaimed Ruth again.
"Why, they'd take you along, of course, if you wanted to go," said Tom.
"But I don't wish to go in any such way," the girl of the Red Mill
declared. "I want to go for just one purpose--_to help_. And it must be
something worth while. There will be enough dilettante assistants in
every branch of the work. My position must mean something to the cause,
as well as to me, or I will stay right here in Cheslow."
He looked at her with the old admiration dawning in his eyes.
"Ah! The same old Ruthie, aren't you?" he murmured. "The same
independent, ambitious girl, whose work must _count_. Well, I fancy your
chance will come. We all seem to be on our way. I wonder to what end?"
There was no sentimental outcome of their talk. After all they were only
over the line between boy-and-girlhood and the grown-up state. Tom was
too much of a man to wish to anchor a girl to him by any ties when the
future was so uncertain. And nothing had really ever happened to them to
stir those deeper passions which must rise to the surface when two
people talk of love.
They were merely the best of friends. They had no other ties of a warmer
nature than those which bound them in friendship to each other. They
felt confidence in each other if the future was propitious; but now----
"I am sure you will make your mark in the army, Tom, dear," Ruth said to
him. "And I shall think of you--wherever you are and wherever I
am--always!"