Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/184

174 pools of dark, still water lying here and there among the quiet hills of Ridgefield, Massachusetts, were scarcely rippled by the cannon-boom and bomb-fire of the early weeks of the European War. Reba, like many of her isolated New England sisters that summer, sitting late afternoons in their low rockers, their sewing laid aside a moment while they read of the far-away tramping of armies across neutral Belgium (few of the horrors of that march had filtered through then), of the menacing advance upon Paris, of the battle of the Marne, felt no shock or alarm.

Why, Reba had never heard of Marne! Where was it, anyway? Didn't know how to pronounce it. Nor Joffre either—town or man, whichever it was. It would come out all right somehow, she guessed, as, with a little listless sigh, she lay aside the local newspaper and resumed her desultory sewing. Things usually did.

It surprised Reba to hear the city buzz of the war, like a disturbed beehive. She heard it discussed everywhere—on street-cars, in elevators, restaurants, from behind ribbon-counters, in the subway. It might have been a catastrophe taking place around the next corner, in a spot familiar to them all. Reba was secretly ashamed of her placid attitude, and before she had been a week in Boston stole away to the public library to study maps and boundaries, and inform herself upon the confused early details of this thing over there, which to her wonderment was reaching out its long arm and actually touching her!

It was Miss Park who made Reba really feel the war. Miss Park was like one inspired that fall. She made the struggle over there an intimate thing to all