Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/284



I found Eileen O'Connor refreshing and invigorating, so that it was good to be in her company. Most people in England at that time, at least those I met, were "nervy," depressed, and apprehensive of evil to come. There was hardly a family I knew who had not one vacant chair wherein a boy had sat when he had come home from school or office, and afterwards on leave. Their ghosts haunted these homes and were present in any company where people gathered for conversation or distraction. The wound to England's soul was unhealed, and the men who came back had received grave hurt, many of them, to their nervous and moral health.

This Irish girl was beautifully gay, not with that deliberate and artificial gaiety which filled London theatres and dancing-halls, but with an inner flame of happiness. It was difficult to account for that. She had seen much tragedy in Lille. Death and the agony of men had been familiar to her. She had faced death herself, very closely, escaping, as she said, by a narrow "squeak." She had seen the brutality of war and its welter of misery for men and women, and now in time of Peace she was conscious of the sufferings of many people, and did not hide these things from her mental vision, or cry, "All's right with the world!" when all was wrong. But something in her character, something, perhaps, in her faith, enabled her to resist the pressure of all this morbid emotion and to face it squarely, with smiling eyes. Another thing that attracted one was her fearlessness of truth.