True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze.
The evening after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, she attended a mass
meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an
umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump
in her throat.
The day the Rainbow Division swept up Fifth Avenue in farewell, she
could see the rank and file from the roof of the Forty-second Street
office building, as if the avenue were running a clayey stream, and she
was torn between the ache and the thanksgiving of having no one to give.
But, for the most part, war kept its talons off Lilly. Twice, and as if
his exemption from the draft lay heavily, Harry Calvert had tried to
enlist, his grandmother, with a zeal that was hardly accountable,
exerting every effort toward that end.
It was almost as if war had revived her somewhat fainting faith in
Harry's ultimate justification.
But he was underweight and still in a weakened condition from an
operation for an adenoidal complaint. This last he had undergone before
the war and at Lilly's urgent instance. She had read, in the mass of
books on child hygiene, psychology, and physiology she was constantly
accumulating, the debilitative effects that adenoidal breathing might
exercise upon an entire constitution and mentality.
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