Then, under all the blasphemy, the talk about women, the surface sordidness of their daily lives and thoughts, there was one instinct common to all, one love, one hidden purity. And the keyword to those depths was "home."
"Home," he said one day to Lily Cardew. "Mostly it's the home they've left, and maybe they didn't think so much of it then. But they do now. And if it isn't that, it's the home they want to have some day." He looked at Lily. Sometimes she smiled at things he said, and if she had not been grave he would not have gone on. "You know," he continued, "there's mostly a girl some place. All this talk about the nation, now--" He settled himself on the edge of the pine table where old Anthony Cardew's granddaughter had been figuring up her week's accounts, and lighted his pipe, "the nation's too big for us to understand. But what is the nation, but a bunch of homes?"
"Willy dear," said Lily Cardew, "did you take any money out of the cigar box for anything this week?"
"Dollar sixty-five for lard," replied Willy dear. "As I was saying, we've got to think of this country in terms of homes. Not palaces like yours--"
"Good gracious!" said Lily, "I don't live in a palace. Get my pocket-book, will you? I'm out three dollars somehow, and I'd rather make it up myself than add these figures over again. Go on and talk, Willy. I love hearing you."
"Not palaces like yours," repeated Mr. Cameron, "and not hovels. But mostly self-respecting houses, the homes of the plain people. The middle class, Miss Cardew. My class. The people who never say anything, but are squeezed between capital, represented by your grandfather, with its parasites, represented by you, and--"
"You represent the people who never say anything," observed the slightly flushed parasite of capital, "about as adequately as I represent the idle rich."
Yet not even old Anthony could have resented the actual relationship between them. Lily Cardew, working alone in her hut among hundreds of men, was as without sex consciousness as a child. Even then her flaming interest was in the private soldiers. The officers were able to amuse themselves; they had money and opportunity. It was the doughboys she loved and mothered. For them she organized her little entertainments. For them she played and sang in the evenings, when the field range in the kitchen was cold, and her blistered fingers stumbled sometimes over the keys of the jingling camp piano.