Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/320

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cheeks padding by one's side, so that I was glad to see the flames in the hearth and to hear the cheerful clink of tea-cups which the doctor was getting out. Better still was I glad to see these two good friends, so sane, so vital, so purposeful, as I found them, in a world of gloom and neurosis.

The doctor told me of their work. It was life-saving, and increasing in range of action. They had organised a number of feeding centres in Vienna, and stores from which mothers could buy condensed milk and cocoa, and margarine, at next to nothing, for their starving babes. Austrian ladies were doing most of the actual work apart from organisation at headquarters, and doing it devotedly. From America, and from England, money was flowing in.

"The tide of thought is turning," said the doctor. "Every dollar we get, and every shilling, is a proof that the call of humanity is being heard above the old war-*cries."

"And every dollar, and every shilling," said Eileen, "is helping to save the life of some poor woman or some little mite, who had no guilt in the war, but suffered from its cruelty."

"This job," said the doctor, "suits my peculiar philosophy. I am not out so much to save these babies' lives——"

Here Eileen threatened to throw the teapot at his head.

"Because," he added, "some of them would be better dead, and anyhow you can't save a nation by charity. But what I am out to do is to educate the heart of the world above the baseness of the passions that caused the massacre in Europe. We're helping to do it by saving the children, and by appealing to the chivalry of men and women across the old frontiers. We're killers of