"We're All That's Left of the Charles Darlington Post."
See page 19.
COMRADES
BY
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS
ILLUSTRATED BY
HOWARD E. SMITH
HARPER & BROTHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
M . C . M . X . I
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1911
ILLUSTRATIONS
"We're All That's Left of the Charles Darlington Post" . . . . . . Frontispiece
"Folks Don't Amount to Anything. It's You, Peter"
She Thought of the Slow News of the Slaughtering Battles
COMRADES
In the late May evening the soul of summer had gone suddenly incarnate,but the old man, indifferent and petulant, thrashed upon his bed. Hewas not used to being ill, and found no consolations in weather.Flowers regarded him observantly—one might have said critically—fromthe tables, the bureau, the window-sills: tulips, fleurs-de-lis,pansies, peonies, and late lilacs, for he had a garden-loving wife whomade the most of "the dull season," after crocuses and daffodils, andbefore roses. But he manifested no interest in flowers; less thanusual, it must be owned, in Patience, his wife. This was a markedincident. They had lived together fifty years, and she had acquiredher share of the lessons of marriage, but not that ruder one givenchiefly to women to learn—she had never found herself a negligiblequantity in her husband's life. She had the profound maternal instinctwhich is so large an element in the love of every experienced andtender wife; and when Reuben thrashed profanely upon his pillows,staring out of the window above the vase of jonquils, without lookingat her, clearly without thinking of her, she swallowed her surprise asif it had been a blue-pill, and tolerantly thought:
"Poor boy! To be a veteran and can't go!"
Her poor boy, being one-and-eighty, and having always had health andher, took his disappointment like a boy. He felt more outraged that hecould not march with the other boys to decorate the graves to-morrowthan he had been, or had felt that he was, by some of the importanttroubles of his long and, on the whole, comfortabl