It was the day for great destinies. Germany was starving; yet German armies, stronger and better prepared than ever before, were about to annihilate the British and the French. Austria, crumbling, was secretly suing for peace; yet Austria was awaiting only the melting of snow in the mountain passes before striking for Venice and Padua. Russia was reorganizing to fight again on the side of the allies; Russia, prostrate, had become a mere reservoir of manpower for the Hohenzollerns. The U-boats were beaten; the U-boats were sweeping the seas. America had half a million men in France; America had only “symbolical battalions” parading in Paris.
A thousand lies balanced a thousand denials; the pointer of credulity swung toward the lies again; and so it swung and swung with everything uncertain but the one fact which seemed, on this day, perfectly plain—American effort had collapsed. America not only had failed to aid her allies during the nine months since she had entered the war; she seemed to have ceased even to care for herself. Complete proof of this was that for five days now industries had been shut down, offices were empty, furnaces cold.
Upon that particular Tuesday morning, the fifth day of this halt, a girl named Ruth Alden awoke in an underheated room at an Ontario Street boarding house—awoke, merely one of the millions of the inconsiderable in Chicago as yet forbidden any extraordinary transaction either to her credit or to her debit in the mighty accounts of the world war. If it be true that tremendous fates approaching cast their shadows before, she was unconscious of such shadows as she arose that morning. To be sure, she reminded herself when she was dressing that this was the day that Gerry Hull was arriving home from France; and she thought about him a good deal; but this was only as thousands of other romance-starved girls of twenty-two or thereabouts, who also were getting up by gaslight in underheated rooms at that January dawn, were thinking about Gerry Hull. That was, Ruth would like, if she could, to welcome him home to his own people and to thank him that day, in the name of his city and of his country, for what he had done. But this was to her then merely a wild, unrealizable fantasy.
What was actual and immediately before her was that Mr. Sam Hilton—the younger of the Hilton brothers, for whom she was office manager—had a real estate deal on at his office. He was to be there at eight o’clock, whether the office was heated or not, and she also was to be there to draw deeds and releases and so on; for someone named Cady who was over draft age, but had himself accepted by an engineer regiment, was sacrificing a fine factory property for a quick sale and Sam Hilton, who was in class one but still hoped somehow to avoid being called, was snapping up the bargain.
So Ruth hurried downtown much as usual upon that cold morning; and she felt only a little more conscious contempt for Sam Hilton—and for herself—as she sat beside him from eight until after nine, with her great coat on and with her hands pulled up in her sleeves to keep them warm while he schemed and reschemed to make a certain feature of his deal with the patriotic Cady more favorable to himself. He had tossed the morning paper upon his desk in front of him with the columns folded up which displayed Gerry Hull’s picture in his uniform and which told about Gerry Hull’s arriving that morning and about his service in France. Thus Ruth knew that Sam Hilton had been reading about Lieutenant Hull also; and, indeed, Hilton referred to him when he had made the last correction upon the contract and was in good humor and ready to put business aside for a few minutes and be personal.
