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Janice and I grew into long-legged schoolgirls in those war-shadowed years. But there was little jubilation in our household when Armistice Day came, for Father had died of pneumonia at a base hospital in France two years earlier. Already his name appeared in memorials at the mill and the church; and the bronze tablet above our pew bore the inscription:

To the glory of God, and the memory of Elliott Blair, who served in war in order that peace might be preserved, and who died in France, March 12, 1916.

"There is a way which seemeth right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death."

Somehow I could never connect this father who had become a hero with the humorous, easy-going one of the old studio days. His personality grew dim and brittle like the twisted tubes of paint and the dried colors on the palette he would never hold again.

The years were long and separate then, one from another, though now they blur and mingle in my mind. They have run together the way raindrops will on a pane of window glass.

It is strange to remember how Janice and I lived through them side by side, and yet how surely we grew farther and farther apart with each one that passed. We shared the same room till we had reached our teens. We read the same books, practiced at the same piano and went to school and parties together. But always our thoughts and feelings moved in separate paths.

It disturbed Aunt Em's faith in family ties that we two sisters should have so little in common. There had been a deep and close relationship always between herself and her brothers. We were happy, though, in our different ways with trips to Boston for concerts and plays and shopping, and dancing and painting and music lessons besides our school work. I managed to keep at the head of my class, and Janice slipped along in hers.

"It's really a shame to keep Emily in a school like this," I overheard a teacher say to Aunt Em once. I was in the next room sketching a medieval castle on the blackboard to illustrate tomorrow's lesson. "She needs more competition. Have you ever thought of sending her to Blairstown High School?"

"To public school?" I caught a note of shocked surprise in Aunt Em's response.

"I ought not to suggest your changing." The teacher was new at school and evidently worried at what she had said. "I'd probably lose my job tomorrow if you quoted me, but I've watched Emily, and--well, if you're from the best family in a town like this, you get to taking a good deal for granted, to lose initiative. I'd like to see Emily have to exert herself, and she would if she had to hold her own with some of those Polish and Russian and Irish youngsters that are trying to be something better than mill hands."

"I can think of worse things they could be." I knew from Aunt Em's voice how her back must have stiffened. "Certainly you won't find many mills as progressive as ours--"

Other voices broke in just then, and I heard no more. But I have always been grateful to that teacher whose name I have forgotten. The next September I was allowed to enter Blairstown High School in the face of disapproval from most of our relatives. Cousin Eunice Blair was particularly vehement on the subject when she came to attend the fall directors' meeting.

"You know it doesn't look right, Em, a girl in her position going to public school. People will think you're either poor or peculiar. If you had any sense you'd be sending her to boarding school this year to make good social contacts."

"I like high school," I repeated stubbornly. "If I can make geometry and Latin up by June I can graduate with the class of 1925."

"That's the year you ought to 'come out,'" Cousin Eunice reminded me. "You're sixteen now and not bad-looking if Em had any sense about dressing you. I was planning to give a dance for you in Boston this Christmas if Em and Wallace felt like sharing expenses."

"I'd rather be in the Christmas play," I told her. "We're doing 'Everyman' and I'm trying for the lead though there's a girl named Angeletta Rossi who may get the most votes because she's almost as good as a real actress. She's planning to be one some day."

"I suppose boys are going to take part in this play too?" Cousin Eunice eyed me sharply across the table.

"Oh, yes! Young Jo Kelly's been selected already for the prologue."

"Well," Cousin Eunice turned to Aunt Em with raised eyebrows, "Elliott had plenty of queer ideas, but at least he kept his wife out of the mills once he married her. You seem to be doing your best to put his daughter back there. I suppose you'll go to see this play, Em, and enjoy watching some Pole or Lithuanian boy making love to your niece?"

"She can't," I protested. "It isn't that kind of play. It's an old English morality--"

"Call it what you want to, facts are facts, aren't they, Wallace?"

Uncle Wallace, when directly appealed to, took my side.

"It never did me any harm to rub up against the workers' families when I was a boy. Makes it easier for me to deal with the men now because we went to school together. Plenty of them still call me by my first name."

"A man can afford that kind of thing," Cousin Eunice reminded him, "but it cheapens a girl. And they didn't take advantage of it then, the way they do now. There's too much of this 'I'm as good and better than you are' spirit, and that's what leads to trouble, like the kind they're having at Fenwick and Low's plant."

"I certainly don't like the sound of that," Uncle Wallace put in. "And this big strike they've called at Fall River doesn't look as if it could be staved off."

"You'd better keep a firm hand if you don't want one starting here--"

"Oh, not at Peace-Pipe," Aunt Em protested. "We're not like those big impersonal plants where they've lost touch with the workers as individuals. There's a different spirit here."

I was grateful that the conversation had taken this turn, and that I no longer need be the target for criticism.

"Spirit's all right," Cousin Eunice was going on, "but what matters is profit. A mill that's going full tilt and making money doesn't have to worry about trouble with its hands. If the war could just have lasted a few months longer the way we expected it to," Cousin Eunice sighed, "then we wouldn't have been left with all that surplus stock to get rid of."

"Yes," Uncle Wallace agreed as he lighted his cigar. "We ought not to have put in that extra equipment and laid in so much cotton at skyrocket prices. It was against my better judgment, but with those Army contracts it seemed all right."

"Oh, please--" Aunt Em's voice shook. "I can't bear to think of the war that way--in profit and losses. It seems like betraying Elliott. Surely things must get back to normal soon?"

I left them discussing mill problems round the fire, for Maggie had come to tell me that young Jo Kelly was waiting for me. We climbed the stairs to the room that had been Father's studio and was now my study. The easel had been pushed into a corner, and all the unframed canvases were stacked face against the wall like children in disgrace. We spread our books and papers under the lamp on the old flat-topped table, and Jo helped me with my geometry and I checked his outline of Burke's "Speech on Conciliation." Then we heard each other recite speeches from "Everyman." Jo knew his lines, but he kept making careless mistakes. I could tell that something was on his mind.

"Jo," I said at last, "what makes you frown like that? You haven't walked to school with me for nearly a week now. Is anything wrong?"

His eyes avoided mine.

"Well, no." He shifted in his chair and began to sort out his books and papers. "I got a lot of things to do, that's all."

But it was more than that, and we both knew it. I leaned across the table and made him face me.

"Would you be sorry if I got the part in 'Everyman' instead of Angeletta?" I asked.

He flushed.

"I think Angie's better," he said finally. "I'd rather see her act it even if she can't get as good a costume as you could. It's just fun to you, but she really cares."

There was a long, uncomfortable silence between us broken only by the big maple tree outside tapping its twigs at the dark windowpane.

"It's got nothing to do with Angie," he went on. "I like you better when it comes to that, only--"

"Only you wish I'd stayed at private school," I interrupted. "And you wish you didn't have to live over here on our side of the river, don't you?"

"Maybe I do and maybe I don't. I guess you just have to find out some time where you belong."

He gathered up his books and turned to go.

"Listen, Jo," I begged. "If you think Angeletta wants the part so much, I could always pretend I've got a cold and not try out for the play."

He turned on me harshly.

"She doesn't want you to give her the part."

"How would she know?"

"You couldn't fool her. No, you've got to see a thing through once you start it."

After his footsteps had clattered into silence on the uncarpeted back stairs I sat a long while over the open books. But I couldn't go on studying. Janice had begun to play the piano downstairs, and the music came up to me thinned and saddened by distance and my own inner hurt. Jo had only made more clear what I had felt for some weeks past. It was all very well for me to go to high school, but when the doors closed I walked alone in my direction while the rest streamed back across the bridges to a world into which I could not follow them, any more than they could follow me into mine.