"I see now why I learned how to fill grease-cups," she exclaimed joyfully the first night she spent until dawn in the make-shift garage, getting the Unit's several cars ready for an early start of relief and succor. Or a little later when in an emergency she was sent to watch alone beside the death-bed of an old French woman, "I see now why I took home-nursing." And again when she found herself working with spade and hoe on the bruised French soil, searing over its open cuts and gashes, healing it, giving it new life, "I see now why I put in six months learning about the habits of potatoes and corn and beans."
"I see now why I play the piano a little," she confided to herself as she helped teach grave little black-frocked French children to laugh and to sing again. "I wonder," she groped, "if all honest effort, even brief and fragmentary effort like mine has always been, needs only to be harnessed up the way steam does, to be of use to the world."
However, in spite of the fact that Constance saw her life daily becoming a more useful and significant one, she was not entirely satisfied. There still lurked doubts, misgivings. It occurred to her, with troublesome frequency, that there waited eagerly at home twenty girls at least, to fill her place in the Unit, should she drop
