"But when women tell me that the women have the worst of it--that they must sit at home and weep and wait, I don't believe it. We suffer--of course, and there's the thought of it all like a bad dream, and when we love our loved ones--it is heartbreak. But the men suffer, daily, in all the little things. The thirst and the vermin, and the cold and wet--and the noise--and the frightfulness. And they grow tired and hungry and homesick,--and death is on every side of them, and horror--. Some of the women who come to the shop sentimentalize a lot. One woman recited, 'Break, break, break--, the other day, and the rest of them cried into the gauze, _cried for themselves_, if you please; 'For men must work and women must weep.' And then my little blonde told them what she thought of them. Her name is 'Maisie,' wouldn't you know a girl like that would be called 'Maisie'?
"'If you think,' she said, 'that you suffer--what in God's name will you think before the war is over? It hasn't touched you. You won't know what suffering means until your men begin to come home. You talk about hardships; not one of you has gone hungry yet--and the men over there may be cut off at any moment from food supplies, and they are always at the mercy of the camp cooks, who may or may not give them things that they can eat. And they lie out under the stars with their wounds, and if any of you has a finger ache, you go to bed with hot water bottles and are coddled and cared for. But our boys,--there isn't anyone to coddle them--they have to stick it out. And we've got to stick it out--and not be sorry for ourselves. Oh, why should we be sorry for ourselves!' The tears were streaming down her cheeks when she finished, and a gray-haired woman who had wept with the others got up and came over to her. 'My dear,' she said, 'I shall never pity myself again. My two sons are over there, and I've been thinking how much I have given. But they have given their young lives, their futures--their bodies, to be broken--' And then standing right in the middle of the Toy Shop that mother prayed for her sons, and for the sons of other women, and for the husbands and lovers, and that the women might be brave.
"Oh, it was wonderful--as she stood there like a white-veiled prophetess, praying.