At a Girl's Mercy, or, The Fortunes of War — page 177: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

166 AT A GIRLS MERCY. ee into the steady, grieved ones opposite. “See, you cannot even give up trying to flatter us here in the very heart of the field. You soften, or think you soften, any hard thought of us you may possess by — a little softened word of our gentle virtues. Oh, you can never know us women, Charlie! You fight in the field, and you win the great victories of the world, and then you come back to us, and say what brave women we are to have nursed afew men back to life who must else have died. You do not and could not credit us with a bravery that sit doing ab- — solutely nothing but wait, without even knowing what may chance to fall upon us from one day to the next, having, it may be, some friend, or brother, or father, whom we may hear, not knowing, has died in the fight, and can never come to us again. You say we are brave if we come out to the field, and do the work we can do, being simply women, but you never know the agony of those sitting at home with nothing to do but wait. Oh, yes. you call us brave littke women, and smile upon us, and maybe give us a closer place in.your hearts for this little we have done, but those others shut out from our small field of laboring for those daily falling, you never give a thought. Do you not know it takes a braver soul, whether woman or man, to sit down with nothing to do for the struggle than it does for the man or woman to enter the field and fight hand to hand with the threatened evil? You can never understand us, Charlie—you big, brave men. We honor you for the strength that gives us the victory, but we honor more those who are forced to lie by » any active help they may not give. If they have done what they could, we would not have them do more. They are more thoroughly heroes to bear _ with the brave spirit that carried them through the war, the enforced idleness, than though they fought every day and all day long with the ranks onthe - fields. They were men then, they are heroes now!’ Her face was flushed in this little speech of hers for the defense of her sister women. Her listener, with her earnest face so near his own, caught himself wondering how he could have ‘comicbooks.com | A ; So as . : “ Py’ - PS amet i co = : » ; ; . , aye eis vO SD) ei