Middle-aged husbands and wives who had sunk into comfortable acceptance of each other and their boys and girls are being dragged out of bed, as it were, and wakened up and made to stand on their feet and face unbelievable possibilities.

If you have boys old enough to be soldiers and girls old enough to be victims--your life makes a sort of _volte face_ and everyday, worldly comforts and successes or little failures drop out of your line of sight, and change their values.

Mothers are beginning to clutch at their sons; and even self-centred fathers and selfish pretty sisters look at their male relatives with questioning, with a hint of respect or even awe in it.
Perhaps the women feel it more than the men.

Good-looking, light-minded, love-making George has assumed a new aspect to his mother and to Kathryn.

They're secretly yearning over him.