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72 ready to sail the following day, would be disastrous to the motor-corps plan. "Moreover, I'm an awful coward. They may want fools in France but they can't want cowards. Why, whenever I sleep in a room alone at night, I look under my bed. I'm that kind. And a mouse rustling paper in a waste-basket, or the creak of a willow-chair, simply makes my blood run cold."

In the months that followed, Constance often asked herself if she would have possessed enough moral stamina to grasp the great opportunity offered her if it had not been for Myrtle's letter. Myrtle's letter came the morning after the theater-party. It was written in pencil, feebly, but its news, it appeared, was too important, too wonderful, to be postponed till strength returned. Myrtle announced triumphantly the arrival of a brand new little Sammy for the army!

She needn't, it seemed to Constance, have put it just like that to her, who couldn't provide little Sammies. She needn't have said to her that the happiest moment of a woman's life was when her infant son (Myrtle's two other children had been girls) was laid in her arms by a proud father. Really it did seem to Constance as if Myrtle enjoyed not only waking up her black