“I can't understand it, Laban,” he confided in deep distress to Mr. Keeler. “I give in I don't know anything at all about this. I'm clean off soundin's. If all this newspaper stuff is so Albert was right all the time and I was plumb wrong. Here's this feller,” picking up a clipping from the desk, “callin' him a genius and 'a gifted youth' and the land knows what. And every day or so I get a letter from somebody I never heard of tellin' me what a comfort to 'em those poetry pieces of his are. I don't understand it, Labe. It worries me. If all this is true then--then I was all wrong. I tried to keep him from makin' up poetry, Labe--TRIED to, I did. If what these folks say is so somethin' ought to be done to me. I--I--by thunder, I don't know's I hadn't ought to be hung! . . . And yet--and yet, I did what I thought was right and did it for the boy's sake . . . And--and even now I--I ain't sartin I was wrong. But if I wasn't wrong then this is . . . Oh, I don't know, I don't know!”
And not only in South Harniss were there changes of heart. In New York City and at Greenwich where Mrs. Fosdick was more than ever busy with war work, there were changes. When the newspaper accounts of young Speranza's heroic death were first published the lady paid little attention to them. Her daughter needed all her care just then--all the care, that is, which she could spare from her duties as president of this society and corresponding secretary of that. If her feelings upon hearing the news could have been analyzed it is probable that their larger proportion would have been a huge sense of relief. THAT problem was solved, at all events. She was sorry for poor Madeline, of course, but the dear child was but a child and would recover.
But as with more and more intensity the limelight of publicity was turned upon Albert Speranza's life and death and writing, the wife of the Honorable Fletcher Fosdick could not but be impressed. As head of several so-called literary societies, societies rather neglected since the outbreak of hostilities, she had made it her business to hunt literary lions. Recently it was true that military lions--Major Vermicelli of the Roumanian light cavalry, or Private Drinkwater of the Tank Corps--were more in demand than Tagores, but, as Mrs. Fosdick read of Sergeant Speranza's perils and poems, it could not help occurring to her that here was a lion both literary and martial. Decidedly she had not approved of her daughter's engagement to that lion, but now the said lion was dead, which rendered him a perfectly harmless yet not the less fascinating animal. And then appeared The Lances of Dawn and Mrs. Fosdick's friends among the elect began to read and talk about it.