“I do not say they did right and I do not say they did wrong,” said Susan, when she heard of it. “But I will say that I would not have minded throwing a few stones myself. One thing is certain—Whiskers-on-the-moon said in the post office the day the news came, in the presence of witnesses, that folks who could not stay home after they had been warned deserved no better fate. That man, Mrs. Dr. dear, may be and is a member of our session, but I know one thing. If I was dead and he came to my funeral I would rise up and order him out. Norman Douglas is fairly foaming at the mouth over it all. ‘If the devil doesn’t get those men who sunk the Lusitania then there is no use in their being a devil,’ he was shouting in Carter’s store last night. Norman Douglas always has believed that anybody who opposed him was on the side of the devil, but a man like that is bound to be right once in a while. Bruce Meredith is worrying over the babies who were drowned. And it seems he prayed for something very special last Friday night and didn’t get it, and was feeling quite disgruntled over it. But when he heard about the Lusitania he told his mother that he understood now why God didn’t answer his prayer—He was too busy attending to the souls of all the people who went down on the Lusitania. That child’s brain is a hundred years older than his body, Mrs. Dr. dear. As for the Lusitania, it is an awful—occurrence, whatever way you look at it. But Woodrow Wilson is going to write a note about it, so why worry? A pretty president!” and Susan banged her pots about wrathfully. President Wilson was rapidly becoming anathema in Susan’s kitchen.
Mary Vance dropped in one evening to tell the Ingle-
