Then had come Nyoda’s letter: 

  Dearest Winnebagos: 

Can’t you take pity on me and relieve my loneliness?  Here I am, in a house that would make the ordinary hotel look like a bandbox, and since Sherry has gone to France with the Engineers it’s simply ghastly.  For various reasons I do not wish to leave the house, but I shall surely go into a decline if I have to stay here alone.  Can’t you come and spend your vacations with me, as many of you as have vacations?  Please come and amuse your lonesome old Guardian, whose house is bare and dark and cold.

Sahwah tumbled out of her chair with a shout that startled poor Mr. Bob from his slumbers at her feet and set him barking wildly with excitement; Migwan and Gladys fell on each other’s necks in silent rapture, and Hinpoha began packing immediately.  Just one week later they boarded the train and started on their journey to Oakwood.

Sahwah sat and looked at the soldiers in the car with unconcealed envy.  Her ever-smouldering resentment against the fact that she was not a boy had since the war kindled into red rage at the unkindness of fate.  She chafed under the restrictions with which her niche in the world hedged her in.

“I wish I were a man!” she exclaimed impatiently.  “Then I could go to war and fight for my country and—­and go over the top.  The boys have all the glory and excitement of war and the girls have nothing but the stupid, commonplace things to do.  It isn’t fair!”

“But women are doing glorious things in the war,” Migwan interrupted quickly.  “They’re going as nurses in the hospitals right at the front; they’re working in the canteens and doing lots of other things right in the thick of the excitement.”

“Oh, yes, women are,” replied Sahwah, “but girls aren’t.  Long ago, in the days before the war, I used to think if there ever would be a war the Camp Fire Girls would surely do something great and glorious, but here we are, and the only thing we can do is knit, knit, knit, and fold bandages, and the babies in the kindergarten are doing that.  We’re too young to do anything big and splendid.  We’re just schoolgirls, and no one takes us seriously.  We can’t go as nurses without three years’ training—­we can’t do anything.  There might as well not be any war, for all I’m doing to help it.  Boys seventeen years old can enlist, even sixteen-year-old ones, and go right to the front, but a girl sixteen years old isn’t any better off than if she were sixteen months.  I’m nearly nineteen, and I wanted to go as a stenographer, but they wouldn’t consider me for a minute.  Said I was too young.”  Sahwah threw out her hands in a tragic gesture and her brow darkened.

“It’s a shame,” Hinpoha agreed sympathetically.  “In books young girls have no end of adventures in war time, girls no older than we; they catch spies and outwit the enemy and save their lovers’ lives and carry important messages, but nothing like that will ever happen to us.  All we’ll ever do is just stay at home peacefully and knit.”