Page:Our Girls.pdf/97

 her home with the object of lecturing her on the imprudence of her early marriage, or perhaps the improvidence of having too many children. When she can indulge both passions at once, her time of rest after meals in the canteen is a period of rollicking joy. One of the most popular of the probably fabulous stories in some of the factories at the period of my tour was of a lady of something-and-forty, aflame with patriotic fire, sweeping up in the street to a young munition foreman who was not wearing his badge, with the withering question, "Why aren't you carrying a white feather, sir?" Whereupon the young foreman quickly replied, "And why aren't you carrying a war-baby, ma'am?"  Tommy's sister is as honest as the sun in big things, but in little ones she sometimes has her besetting weaknesses, and in the matter of boots and hats she is not always to be trusted. The munition factories, particularly the filling factories, where both boots and hats have to be  Rh