Kedzie
was so blue and terrified that she had to send for Jake Vanderveer
to keep from going crazy. He told her that the market was still on
the climb, and that her sympathy had saved his life. He had been
desperate enough for suicide when he met her, and now he was one
of the rising little suns of finance.
Mrs. Dyckman did not die, but she did not get well, and Jim's
father wrote him that he'd better resign and come home. It would do
his mother a world of good, and he was doing the country no good
down there.
Jim was alarmed; he wrote out his resignation and submitted it to
his colonel, who showed him a new order from the War Department
announcing that no more resignations would be accepted except on
the most urgent grounds. Idleness was destroying the Guard faster
than a campaign. Jim returned to the doldrums with a new resentment.
He was a prisoner now.
He had gone to Texas to find war and his wife to Newport to find
gaiety. She found much more than that. On October 7th the old town
was stirred by something genuinely new in sensations--the arrival
of a German war submarine, the U-53.
THE FOURTH BOOK
THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS
CHAPTER I
A freight submarine, the _Bremen_, had recently excited
the wonderment of a world jaded with miracles by crossing from
Helgoland to Norfolk with a cargo. But here was a war-ship that
dived underneath the British blockade.
The dead of the Lusitania were still unrequited and unburied, but
the Germans had graciously promised President Wilson to sink no
more passenger-ships without warning, and they had been received
back into the indulgence of the super-patient neutrals.
Pages:
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576