ing bridges." There were three years yet in which she might stretch her untried wings and fly.
She returned to her place in the various classes at the Alliance, with a dogged determination to make the most of each precious day; in spite of forebodings, to sample every interest and harmless pleasure that the city had to offer, even if the query, "Should a married woman go adventuring?" did prod her every now and then. Life had never seemed so rich, so full of possibilities as it did to Reba that Indian summer when she returned to Boston. The Indian summer of her own life enveloped her in its glowing warmth, the very consciousness of the brevity of the rare season of postponed youth, making her live each day with intensity.
It was an arousing and awakening period for everybody, for it was the fall of 1914 during the first October of the Great War that Reba came back to the city groping again for a broader outlook and a clearer vision.
In Ridgefield the war had seemed a far-away, remote thing to Reba, incomprehensible, as all foreign affairs had always seemed to her. The minister at the Ridgefield Congregational Church had made several references to it, and in his long prayer, every Sunday morning since August first, had asked that the rulers of Europe might be wisely guided in their disturbed affairs. But those disturbed affairs had not concerned Reba. A difference of opinion way over there across the Atlantic Ocean couldn't hurt her any more than one of those awful earthquakes one reads about every so often burying some unheard-of community on the other side of the globe. The sealed-up
