Mrs. Wheeler sighed. His tone meant that he had turned his back on old pleasures and old friends.
"Have you and Enid taken tickets for the lecture course in Frankfort?"
"I think so, Mother," he answered a little impatiently. "I told her she could attend to it when she was in town some day."
"Of course," his mother persevered, "some of the programs are not very good, but we ought to patronize them and make the best of what we have."
He knew, and his mother knew, that he was not very good at that. His horses stopped at the water tank. "Don't wait for me. I'll be along in a minute." Seeing her crestfallen face, he smiled. "Never mind, Mother, I can always catch you when you try to give me a pill in a raisin. One of us has to be pretty smart to fool the other."
She blinked up at him with that smile in which her eyes almost disappeared. "I thought I was smart that time!"
It was a comfort, she reflected, as she hurried up the hill, to get hold of him again, to get his attention, even.
While Claude was washing for dinner, Mahailey came to him with a page of newspaper cartoons, illustrating German brutality. To her they were all photographs,—she knew no other way of making a picture.
"Mr. Claude," she asked, "how comes it all them Germans is such ugly lookin' people? The Yoeders and the German folks round here ain't ugly lookin'."
Claude put her off indulgently. "Maybe it's the ugly ones that are doing the fighting, and the ones at home are nice, like our neighbours."
"Then why don't they make their soldiers stay home, an' not go breakin' other people's things, an' turnin' 'em out of
