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The Incompleat
Eco-Philosopher
SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics

J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, editors

The Incompleat
Eco-Philosopher
Essays from the Edges
of Environmental Ethics

Anthony Weston
a
This book is dedicated to Jim Cheney and Tom Birch,
best of companions in all kinds of wildernesses.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Contents

Preface ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Before Environmental Ethics 23

3 Self-Validating Reduction: Toward a Theory of

Environmental Devaluation 45

4 Environmental Ethics as Environmental Etiquette:

Towards an Ethics-Based Epistemology in
Environmental Philosophy (with Jim Cheney) 65

5 Multicentrism: A Manifesto 89

6 De-Anthropocentrizing the World: Environmental

Ethics as a Design Challenge 109

7 What If Teaching Went Wild? 131

8 Galapagos Stories: Evolution, Creation, and the

Odyssey of Species 149

9 Eco-Philosophy in Space 163

Appendix: Complete Publication List 187

Index 193
This page intentionally left blank.
 Preface

This book is a selection from my work in environmental philosophy over

the past fifteen years or so: essays that explicitly address the question of
method in environmental ethics and this moment in environmental phi-
losophy. The opening essay, new to this volume, sketches the overarching
themes and introduces each essay in context. Eight essays follow, with
brief introductory notes, and there is an accounting of all of my work in
the field at the end.
True to its title, this book is incomplete in a variety of ways. My work
is ongoing, and anyway only some of it appears here. More scandalously,
the work of environmental ethics itself, in the view I wish to advance, is
necessarily and fundamentally incomplete. We speak of what may be one
of the most profound ethical shifts in millennia, at least for the West, and
it is, after all, barely begun. It is still young, still unformed, still bears the
deep marks of its ancestry, its long and uncertain gestation, its labor to
be born. As with any other kind of newborn and delicate thing, we can-
not even begin to glimpse the shape of a settled more-than-human ethics
without a far wider range of ethical experiments and remade practices, all
tested in turn by time and as yet barely foreseen events.
Thus in many ways we still stand, as one of my titles goes, “Before
Environmental Ethics.” All eco-philosophy is radically incomplete. But this
moment of beginnings is also—precisely as such—a moment at which we
can make an immense difference. Certain philosophical and personal practices
are discouraged, yes. Certain traditional aspirations are neither achievable,
in my view, nor desirable. By the same token, though, other truly inviting
and “edgy” new possibilities open up, both in and beyond environmental
ethics and for a transformative philosophical practice in other keys. Take
this collection as a sort of imaginative guidebook, a first survey of the new
country, and an invitation to explore it further yourself.
My previous books in the field got away from me in this regard.
For better or worse, they did not hang around arguing about the usual
conceptual boundary-markers, but ended up already a bend or two of the
trail farther along (perhaps taking the markers along with them, a trick

ix
x Preface

I learned in the actual wilderness from the venerable Tom Birch). When
I began the book that eventually appeared as Back to Earth: Tomorrow’s
Environmentalism (Temple University Press, 1994), I really did mean to
address methodological and conceptual issues as an integral part of the
project. In the end, though, Back to Earth barely speaks to the usual philo-
sophical debates and categories at all. Instead it devotes itself to exploring
the world’s possibilities, sensuous and magical, beyond the wholly human;
to understanding how we have managed to so thoroughly obscure those
depths from ourselves (simply overpowering and destroying them is only
the crudest way); and to seeking out some specific paths, partial and mod-
est enough in their ways but radical still, to recover them, to reconnect. I
came to see that this kind of exploration was quite enough (was more than
enough, in fact could itself only be sketched in the barest way) without
also having to bushwhack through all the usual methodological brambles so
very far off-road, as it were, to what after all is still only a starting point.
Instead I simply found myself speaking from a different place, never mind
how I got there.
A few years later I edited a small collection called An Invitation to
Environmental Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1999), but here again
the main project was more to embody or enact an alternative kind of
philosophy—actually, to model of whole set of them, with varied friends
and fellow travelers—than to make its presuppositions explicit and try to
defend them against the usual (and also usually implicit) expectations.
Yet part of my hope, and a central part of my work, has always been
to contend with and for philosophy itself. Here I part from my friend and
wilderness companion Jim Cheney, who holds that we free spirits should
just re-christen ourselves “ex-philosophers” and head into the high country
with much lighter backpacks. Often enough I am right beside him. But
not always. There is another side. Why cede Philosophy Itself to the most
heavily laden? Why should philosophy be a burden at all? Isn’t it also a
necessary task to make an alternative visible philosophically? The struggle for
a truly environmental philosophy, in the long run, may also be a struggle
for the soul of philosophy itself.
In my essays, then, I have also been writing, right along, in “the
field,” struggling to make alternative ethical and philosophical presup-
positions explicit and to defend them against the usual expectations. This
work has mostly appeared in professional and other journals, however,
and consequently is somewhat scattered over both time and space. Four
of these essays reprinted here first appeared in the journal Environmental
Ethics. Some of these essays have been regularly anthologized in turn.
Others have been published much farther afield—The Canadian Journal
of Environmental Education; the multidisciplinary journal Soundings; and
 Preface xi

Jobs for Philosophers, my self-published “little book of heresies”—and the

last and farthest afield of all, “Eco-Philosophy in Space,” has only been
circulated to (mostly disbelieving) colleagues.
Until now I have not tried to bring these more methodological and
conceptual pieces together in one place. Always there was the next piece,
another trip, some other form in which an idea could be put. In the last few
years, though, a few things have changed. For one thing, I finally attained
the age at which Plato thought one could actually become a philosopher,
so perhaps a certain kind of prelude is over. There is a practical impulse
too. Students and colleagues, as well as I myself, are finding it increasingly
difficult to relocate and recopy articles or find reprints from back issues
of a variety of journals in order to put together readers for students or
to pass on the most helpful or provocative materials to other researchers
and writers. This part of my work has grown and diversified in its own
right but remains too scattered for easy use by others. I am gratified that
others share my feeling that these essays are alive; that together they lay
out the possibility of a dramatically different and still barely suspected way
of thinking about environmental values. But each separate essay needs to
add its piece. It is time they were drawn together in a single place, next
to each other at last.
I want to say for the record that I did not enter the field of envi-
ronmental philosophy with any inkling that it might in time take me into
so many wild lands around the world or bring me such dear friends. Yet
it is so, and I am grateful beyond words.
My greatest debt of gratitude is to the land, this land, almost any
land, to the country that sustains and welcomes, wherever it may be, even
right next door. For me, at least, it is an old debt, the original impulse,
all the way back to those long summers I spent on the prairie as a boy
playing in the woods and cornfields. Long nights under the stars, so cap-
tivating that my first professional ambition was to be an astronomer. A
series of wild companions opened up wider lands for me, starting with my
father when I was freshly minted from high school, whose idea of celebrat-
ing my coming of age was to go backpacking through the Great Smoky
Mountains, though neither of us had ever dreamed of such a thing before.
Ridge trails snaking through high meadow grasses, vanishing into forests
beyond; the blue afternoon mists of those hills; strange birdcalls that later
became as familiar as the plants in my garden—here was the trailhead of
many of my later paths.
Meanwhile environmental consciousness was rising—this was the
early 1970s—so much so that my second serious professional ambition
was to be an environmental lawyer. But barely embarked on that path I
found philosophy, though it was still some time before my philosophical
xii Preface

thinking found, or rather remembered, the larger-than-human world. Phi-

losophy itself is proudly and persistently “on the edge” in certain ways, but
eventually you begin to realize, when you think from the point of view
of the more-than-human world, that most official philosophy still follows
narrowly circumscribed paths, and that even the country that lies over the
first range of low hills just beyond philosophy’s usual thoroughfares may
be quite different and far more fabulous than what shows up along the
usual routes, or even on the maps.
A few years ago, backpacking in the Beaverhead Mountains in south-
west Montana, a friend and I scrambled up a steep talus slope to the very
edge of a ridge—there forming the Continental Divide—to find not only
a still more precipitous drop-away into a stunning country of conical peaks
and ragged valleys, but also a massive thunderstorm rushing up the near-
est cleft practically upon us. It had sounded much farther away from the
other side. You never know. In any case, I am wholly convinced that only
by actually going into such wild country can you also begin to enter, as
it were, this particular wild country of the mind. Scrambling half a mile
down mountaintop scree with the lightning sizzling all around us, as we
did that day; tracking up (another trip) through the rising mists and snow
clouds to a rippling little lake along the Eastern front of the Rockies on the
occasion of the first (September!) snow of the season; waking on bird time,
well before dawn, morning after morning, deep in the woods somewhere;
or simply spending time alone in the larger world, anywhere beyond the
world of mostly human sounds and sights—you inhabit a different world
as a result, everything is different, and from then on your struggle is to
stay true to it in the rest of your work and life: to give it a kind of voice,
to re-inhabit it more deeply, and to keep going back.
And what good fortune to have found such intrepid and generous
companions! Jim Cheney and Tom Birch of ZenLite Philosophical Expedi-
tions fame, first of all, my companions for a decade and a half all over the
edges and high mountain meadows of Montana and Idaho and farther afield,
sometimes even in my dreams, and through a good bit of environmental
and classical philosophy as well. Bob Jickling, Yukon philosopher of educa-
tion and intrepid guide to the land of the midnight sun. The Australians:
Val Plumwood, sharpest of thinkers on “environmental culture”—Forest
Lover, Live Forever!; Freya Mathews, panpsychist; and Patsy Hallen and the
students with whom we trekked along the Bibbulmun Track and through
the Pilbara, aboriginal lands, in 2004. Teacher-activist-writer-dreamer
extraordinaire, Patsy invited me to co-teach an eco-philosophy course she
organized out of Perth’s Murdoch University around two long backpack
trips into the Australian outback. Thus it was that my fiftieth year found
me quite literally all the way around the world from my Carolina home,
 Preface xiii

traipsing overland with students through the red desert and along the
shores of the tumultuous Southern Ocean, sleeping under the shimmering
unfamiliar stars, and later car-camping with my family up and down the
west coast and among the great monoliths of the Red Center and in the
rain forests of the Northern Territory. So much from “the bush” seems
to hover just on the other side of perception, an invitation to something
immense and powerful but seemingly just out of reach. I began to wonder
if that kind of enigmatic depth isn’t a feature of the world in general, just
more visible in the bush, closer to the surface. Australia came back home
with me like an unanswered question, and stays with me still.
My thanks as well to so many other friends and colleagues: to all of
the above not just for their companionship but also very specifically for
comments and suggestions on many of the papers included here; to my
colleagues and co-teachers in the Elon University Department of Philosophy,
especially John Sullivan; to Frithjof Bergmann, Jennifer Church, and David
Abram for long-standing inspiration of many sorts; to Carolyn Toben and
her beautifully conceived Center for Education, Imagination, and the Natural
World; to Irene Klaver, Dexter Roberts, Patti Cruickshank-Schott, Rick Kool,
Holmes Rolston III, Greg Haenel, and Tom Regan; and to my running-
mate Amy Halberstadt and our lovely children Anna Ruth and Molly, who
have now become such good wilderness companions of their own.
For permission to reprint this material here I am grateful to Gene
Hargrove, founder and longtime editor of Environmental Ethics; Bob
Jickling, founder and editor of The Canadian Journal of Environmental
Education; and the editors at Soundings. Anonymous reviewers for all of
these publications were helpful as well. J. Baird Callicott, with whom I
disagree philosophically about nearly everything, nonetheless was the soul
of generosity in shepherding this book toward publication, and Jane Bunker
and her colleagues at the State University of New York Press have been
supportive at every step. Heartfelt thanks to you all.

Anthony Weston
Durham, North Carolina
Summer Solstice, 2007
This page intentionally left blank.
 Chapter 1

Introduction

You might have thought that environmental ethics would enthusiasti-

cally embrace a naturalistic view of values. When the whole effort is to
rejoin the human enterprise to the encompassing world, mustn’t values
be accorded an organic place in that world as well? How else to picture
value except as deeply rooted in embodied perception, coalesced around
desire, need, and susceptibility, and tuned to more-than-human as well
as human rhythms?
Such a picture has another immense attraction too: it does not
make value, as such, a problem. Values so understood do not need to
be “grounded,” at least in the sense that without certain sorts of philo-
sophical self-accounting they would have no foothold in the world at all.
They may need more fertility, reconstruction, and redirection; they may
need criticism, deepening, and change; but the bottom line, regardless, is
that they are already here, quite gloriously here—all of them, of course,
the congenial along with less congenial. Values are not fragile or rare
or delicate or endangered. We do not live in an axiological desert but
in a rain forest. Everywhere the air is thick with them.
Most readers will know, however, that contemporary environmental
ethics has followed a very different path—so far, at least. In the field
as we find it, naturalism is widely mistrusted, and the very existence of
environmental values is taken to be a problem, indeed the most fun-
damental and intractable of problems. We are invited to “ground” our
ethical claims on some independent and philosophically locked-down
“intrinsic value,” or on an ethical theory of a more traditional sort
awkwardly retrofitted for broader-than-human scope. This, for better or
worse, is what seems natural to most philosophers—so natural, indeed,
that its methodological commitments often are not even articulated but
are simply left without saying. And so not only do we learn to live in
the thin air: we also come to imagine that it is, so to speak, the only
kind of atmosphere there could be.
This book is, among other things, a plea to reconsider. The essays
presented here aim to recover and elaborate a systematic alternative to

1
2 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

this entire conception of the proper tasks and methods of environmental

ethics. Environmental ethics emerges here in another key; in radically
different axiological biome, as it were, with thicker air and life already
abundant; and two-footedly “grounded” on the actual ground. Corre-
spondingly, this book also offers a kind of methodological complement
to other work in the field—mine and others’—already in this alternative
key. The necessary sort of work is already underway. The challenge is
partly to learn to see it as such.
Fully embraced, moreover, a thoroughgoing naturalism leads us
much further. I want to suggest that it points to a vision of philosophi-
cal engagement as “reconstructive” in the Deweyan sense—and not just
of environmental philosophy but of the environment itself. The familiar
question of anthropocentrism, for example—of human-centeredness as
a doctrine—appears in an entirely different light. I argue that the root
of the problem is not a doctrine at all, but an actual process: anthro-
pocentrization, the narrowing and relentless humanizing of the actual
world, a world that we make and that pervasively remakes itself both
experientially and conceptually. Typically we suppose that we must
determine what the philosophically mandated “nonanthropocentrism”
must look like and then rebuild the world to suit. From a pragmatic
perspective the actual challenge is the other way around: to remake—or
more pointedly to de-anthropocentrize—the actual world in such a way
that a new ethic, only barely conceivable now, might evolve.
“Nonanthropocentrism,” after all, is only a placeholder, a refusal
without content. We know that we want to escape, but only in the
vaguest way where we need to go. Instead, the task must be to enable
the emergence of a new ethic—by the kinds of settings we create, by
the larger-than-human invitations we offer both in our own bearing
and through the patterns of attention and the possibilities of encounter
we build into the world. We need an environmental etiquette, then, as
much as an ethic. Its development will be a process, an ongoing evolu-
tion rather than some form of theoretical exertion. And it must be a
genuinely multicentric process, in place of the usual moral extension-
isms that, however well-intended, still end up making ourselves the
touchstones and “centers” of an “expanded circle.” This book offers
one path in those directions.

Pragmatism

Environmental ethics’ fundamental complaint is supposed to be that the

dominant attitude toward nature reduces the entire more-than-human
 Introduction 3

world to no more than a means to human ends, and indeed only to

a few of those: to commercially provided consumption opportunities,
more or less immediate and supposedly consequence-less. This crassly
self-centered value system is often labeled pragmatism, which naturally
makes it hard to imagine that the philosophical movement called Prag-
matism in any way could be encouraging to environmental ethics.
This, though, is only the crudest and most journalistic sense of
the word “pragmatism.” John Dewey’s distinctly American philosophy
actually offers something radically different and, in my view, radically
more promising. It is on this point that my work in the field began,
now twenty-five years ago.
Notice first that only a few short and seemingly completely natural
philosophical steps lead the familiar line of environmental-ethical argument
from the rejection of that crass instrumentalism directly into a familiar and
very specific paradigm. If you think that the problem is that we reduce
everything to means to human ends, to resources for our use, then what
could be more obvious than to defend natural values by making them
intrinsic rather than “merely” instrumental? Somehow, we conclude, they
must represent another kind of value: ends rather than means; values
entirely outside of the give-and-take of everyday making-do.
It seems obvious enough. Yet the result is that a vast amount of
energy and ingenuity is spent imagining what such intrinsic values in
nature could be, how they can be kept pure and isolated from anything
instrumental, and how they might finally be “grounded.” Strenuous
and lavishly outfitted overland expeditions continue to be launched
to link them up to everything from self-interest to a variety of new
ontologies. Massive philosophical resources go into rearguard actions to
defend them against various critics and skeptics—though, for all that,
the bottom-line argument all too often is still only some re-invocation
of the original bugbear: “Well then, is nature to be left only a mere
means to our ends?”
My first article in the field took issue with all of this. “Beyond
Intrinsic Value”1 argued that Dewey’s pragmatism points toward a far
richer and more workable understanding of values. Dewey calls us “to
embrace the richness and diversity of our actual values and then to make
full use of that richness and diversity to open up a new sense of possibil-
ity in practical action. Pragmatism so understood represents a pluralistic,
integrative, even experimental approach to ethics, at once almost an
ordinary kind of practical wisdom and a philosophically self-conscious
alternative in ethics.”2 On a Deweyan view, both means and ends can
already be found everywhere: what we really need is to articulate and
re-integrate those now overlooked and marginalized.
4 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

Instead of the familiar insistence on “grounding” intrinsic values

in nature, then, I say that our real challenge is to develop something
more like an ecology of values: to situate natural values in their contexts,
understand their dynamics, and bring them into fuller attention and
wider play. Even the most precious experiences in and of nature, barely
noticeable to so many others and desperately needing wider play, are
already as “grounded” as they need to be, thank you. They are rooted
deep in the interplay of experience and the larger world. What they
really need is more visibility: more loving elaboration, new and recovered
kinds of language, as well as more intentional and systematic design for
their readier emergence in experience.
Put another way: just as the first task of environmentalism proper
is to bring forth a richer sense of where we actually live, of how deeply
intertwined we are and must be with the Earth, so, I argue, one of the
first tasks of environmental ethics is to bring forth a richer sense of what
we do value: of how value, down to earth, actually goes. Even those kinds
of ethics that seem on the surface so relentlessly human-centered often
bring the Earth in the back door, and a wide and mostly unguarded
back door at that. Think of our susceptibility to animals, both domestic
and wild. Think of our fascination with stars and storms. Think of the
hundred million or so Americans who claim to be gardeners, the tens
of millions who belong to a wide range of environmental organizations.
Think of the great nature poets, from Wordsworth to Wendell Berry.
Think of fundamentalist Creationists, for God’s sake, who celebrate this
world as Creation, though not a very dynamic one, I guess. Think even
of our very own professional selves, who would not be so desperately in
search of intrinsic values in nature in the first place if we were not already
persuaded that nature is (to put it in a less ontologically suggestive way)
precious in its own right. We are trying to create (what we will then
describe as “discover”) the sources and underpinnings of (what we will
then describe as a “justification for”) values and perceptions that we in
fact held long before we felt the need for such philosophical exertions.
Maybe it is time to widen the lens. Environmental ethics may have much
more leverage than we usually imagine, right where we already are.

Social Contingency and its Implications

Along with situating values in the sphere of desire I also want to bring
them emphatically into the orbit of social construction. If value is, as I
propose, deeply rooted in embodied perception and coalesced around
desire, need, and susceptibility, then particular values and indeed the
 Introduction 5

whole shape of value-systems are also—yes—contingent. They are not

“givens,” not some kind of timeless essences, but socially and culturally
shaped, and thus open to reshaping as well. I will add right away that
for me this contingency—indeed, pragmatism’s embrace of a kind of
deconstructive method, seeking out and even celebrating contingency,
foolhardy as it too may seem to many in environmental ethics—is in
fact a methodological touchstone. It is what provokes and enables the
fundamentally reconstructive turn that gives my work whatever distinc-
tiveness it may have. But it is also, I know, a rather unsettling path,
whose implications will need to be drawn out slowly in this essay and
throughout this book.
Take for instance the supposed problem of self-centeredness again—
or, more broadly, as Alan Watts famously put it, the “skin-encapsulated
ego.” As we know all too well, egoism is often supposed to be a sort
of default human condition. Indeed, from Hobbes through the theory
of the “Moral Point of View,” such a pessimism about human nature
has been made into the rationale for ethics itself. Dewey would argue,
though, that self-centeredness is no more natural or essential than its
opposite. Human nature, in general, is plastic. People have and have
had many different “natures,” and likely will have still others in times to
come. Nonetheless it may be the case that that human selves are markedly
involuted or fortified in our time. From a social-constructionist angle,
still, this fact, so far as it really is a fact, is not an invitation to keep
debating about “true human nature,” but reappears instead in another
and more challenging guise. Maybe the real danger is that this is what
we are becoming. Egoism and the crasser utilitarianisms, so far from
somehow being the default human condition, might therefore better be
pictured as radical reductions of it, end results of a long and militant
process of self-desiccation. But it is not too late to change directions.
Marx may after all have been right when he said that the real task is not
to solve certain philosophical problems but to change the world so that
such problems do not arise in the first place. It’s not that the problems
are unreal—they can be quite real, and may even have solutions, of a
sort anyway—but rather that they are unnecessary.3 The universe does
not compel us to drive ourselves, either individually or as a species, ever
deeper into our hard little shells. There are other ways, and once again
perhaps quite close beside us.
Broadly deconstructive themes arise first in my essay “Before
Environmental Ethics” (Chapter 2 of this book). Its specific project
is to argue that that contemporary nonanthropocentric environmental
ethics is profoundly shaped by the very anthropocentrism that it aims
to transcend, and therefore that we may have to go much farther afield
6 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

than we have so far imagined if we are to (eventually) truly transcend

anthropocentrism. Consider, for example, the question that contemporary
environmental philosophers take as fundamental: whether “we” should
open the gates of moral considerability to “other” animals (sometimes
just: “animals”), and to the likes of rivers and mountains. “Before Envi-
ronmental Ethics” comments:

[This] phrasing of “the” question may seem neutral and un-

exceptionable. Actually, however, it is not neutral at all. The
called-for arguments address all and only humans on behalf of
“the natural world.” Environmental ethics therefore is invited
to begin by positing, not questioning, a sharp divide that “we”
must somehow cross, taking that “we” unproblematically
to denote all humans. To invoke such a divide, however, is
already to take one ethical position among others.4

For one thing, this entire frame of reference is largely peculiar to modern
Western cultures. Other cultures have felt no compulsion to divide the
entire world between all humans on the one hand and all nature on
the other. Even our own immediate predecessor societies lived in mixed
communities, to use Mary Midgley’s apt term. “The” question above
may be our question, of course: the urbanized, modern, Westerner’s
question. But that is just the point. “The” very question that frames
contemporary environmental ethics presupposes a particular cultural and
historical situation, not at all the only human possibility, and which is
itself perhaps precisely the problem.
We could even reconsider the supposedly fundamental means/end
distinction in this light. Everyday experience suggests that most values
exist in the middle: both means and ends, or between means and ends,
as I put it in another early article, “Between Means and Ends.”5 Dewey
writes of “immediate” values; I speak of “values-as-parts-of-patterns,”
invoking a holistic view in place of the linearity of means-end relations.
In general, the simplest point is that nearly everything has both aspects.
Every value both takes its place in a long—indeed endless—chain of
means and also has its own gratifications in itself. Contrariwise, if we are
losing this two-sidedness—in particular, if more and more of the multiple
and modest natural values next to us are being simplified down to mere
means, a dramatically simplified “ecology of values”—then, once again,
we have a problem. Albert Borgmann and others have perceptively argued
that precisely this is the distinctive malaise of modern industrialism.6
With these last points you already begin to see, I hope, that there
is life after deconstruction: that the specific contingencies of the pres-
 Introduction 7

ent structure of values also open up specific avenues and strategies for
change. This theme especially will take time to unfold, and there are
others that come first, but at this point we should at least note that
precisely this contingency also undercuts the supposed conceptual bar-
riers to environmental ethics that are sometimes invoked from outside
the field.
Take a familiar kind of linguistic or conceptual objection. Still
widely argued is that it is conceptually confused to hold that a mountain
or forest might have some kind of right against dynamiting or clear-
cutting, or that nonconscious beings have moral interests or other any
kind of independent standing against whatever we might wish to do to
them. It is part of the very meaning of rights or interests, many critics
say, that you cannot have them without awareness or at least feeling.
Therefore, inanimate nature cannot have moral standing, and the whole
project of an environmental ethics—valuing nature for its own sake—is
simply confused, mistaken, misconceived. But it is a curiously rigid and
self-congratulatory argument. Surely the very same premise—that envi-
ronmental values are not readily conceivable in present terms—might
much more sensibly be taken to imply that present concepts must be
changed. In a world whose fundamental self-understandings are in flux,
why ever suppose that such a particular conception of interests is some-
how fixed, secure, and timelessly given, let alone somehow accessible to
philosophers in the solitude of their studies or classrooms? This concept
of interests, and indeed the conception of moral consideration that ties
it to interests in the first place, is an artifact of a very specific legal sys-
tem—and there is nothing wrong with that, either, but it is certainly
not the whole story, or any kind of necessity. Such systems are created,
they evolve, and they always must expect re-creation as well.
And we could add: of course the proposed reconceptions will
look “confused.” How else would they look to the guardians of
the established order? That is more like a sign that they are actually
getting somewhere.7

Self-Validating Reduction

A step further into the coevolution of values and world and we begin
to notice some deeper and trickier dynamics. These are the theme of
“Self-Validating Reduction: A Theory of the Devaluation of Nature”
(Chapter 3 of this book).
Often enough we encounter a world that has an apparently “giv-
en” character. And often enough, to be honest, the values for which
8 The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher

environmental ethics wishes to speak—indeed, the values for which ethics

in general wishes to speak—are genuinely hard to see in that world. The
animal inmates of factory farms are bred for such docility and stupidity, and
raised in conditions so inimical to any remaining social or communicative
instinct, that the resulting creatures are pretty poor candidates for rights
or any other kind of moral consideration. Likewise, most of the places of
power revered in the pagan world are gone—often deliberately destroyed
by command of the new, self-describedly “jealous Gods.” But as even the
faintest remnants of the great natural world’s sacredness are degraded and
even the whispers silenced, it becomes progressively harder, sometimes
even for us environmentalists, to see what all the fuss is about.
The familiar consequence is that environmental ethics (and often
ethics in general) is often perceived, even by its advocates, as sentimen-
tal, “nostalgic,” lost in some realm of abstraction and idealization only
tangentially related to “the real world.” Sometimes, I am sure, it is. But
this entire set of expectations, I argue, is also flawed to its core. The
reduced world is not somehow the limit of reality itself. It is a world
we have made—not the only possibility.
Moreover, it is a world we have made in a peculiarly self-reinforcing
way. At work here is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that I call “self-
validating reduction.” Those animals in factory farms, for instance: hav-
ing reduced them to mere shadows of what their ancestors once were,
we then can look at them and genuinely find any sort of moral claim
unbelievable. “See? They really are stupid, dirty, dysfunctional, piti-
able.” But then even more drastic kinds of devaluation and exploitation
become possible. Already the genetic engineers speak of chickens with
no heads at all. The circle closes completely. And the same story can
be told, of course, of the reduction of so many particular places and
of the land in general.
The implications are dramatic. For one thing, it follows that the
environmental crisis is not fundamentally the result of some kind of
error in reasoning, essentially to be engaged on the philosophical level.
Instead, it is “a slow downward spiral, a reduction in fact as well as
in thought, in which our ideas are as much influenced by the reduced
state of the world as vice versa, and . . . each stage is impeccably ratio-
nal.”8 Philosophical conceptions are not merely epiphenomenal in this
process, but they are part of a larger dynamic in which material factors
also make a difference.
For another thing—again, and crucially—this world is no kind
of given. The way things are, right now, is not the way they must
be. We are not stuck defending the world as it is or simply trying to
read values off the world we now see before us. “The world as it is”
 Introduction 9

is itself a production of multiple and sustained reductions. It is in flow,

and open to change. Ethics speaks, instead and in addition, to possi-
bilities—sometimes to thoroughly hidden possibilities, if need be, but
possibilities nonetheless. Part of the very outrage is that they remain so
hidden, that they are so insistently reduced. Ethics’ fundamental effort,
then, is to find ways to bring those possibilities forth. Its voice cannot
be one of mere reportage, justification, or “defense.” No: it must be a
call, an invitation—to assist, and join, the self-unveiling of a different
kind of world.

Environmental Etiquette

“Self-validating reduction” is the first of a series of concepts that together

begin to offer a new sort of conceptual toolbox for environmental ethics.
Two more are introduced in “Environmental Ethics as Environmental
Etiquette” (Chapter 4 of this book), an essay with my philosophical and
backwoods co-adventurer Jim Cheney. Here self-validating reduction
finds its complement in “self-validating invitation,” while environmental
ethics finds its more challenging opposite in what Cheney and I call
“environmental etiquette.”
There are musicians, now, who paddle out to the orca in open
ocean in canoes trailing underwater mikes and speakers, inviting them
to jam, working out new musical forms together. You can order the
CDs on the Internet.9 There are animal trainers whose “ways of moving
fit into the spaces shaped by the animals’ awareness,” as Vicki Hearne
elegantly puts it—and “fit” not so much consciously as instinctively.
Then and only then do the animals respond. There is a self-validating
dynamic here too, then, except headed in the other direction. On the
usual ethical epistemology,

we must first know what animals are capable of and then

decide on that basis whether and how we are to consider
them ethically. On the alternative view, we will have no idea
of what other animals are actually capable of —we will not
readily understand them—until we already have approached
them ethically: that is, until we have offered them the space
and time, the occasion, and the acknowledgment necessary
to enter into relationship.10

If the world is a collection of more or less fixed facts to which we

must respond, then the task of ethics is to systematize and unify our
 Another Random Document on
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Liberty
Girl
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Title: The Liberty Girl

Author: Rena I. Halsey

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIBERTY

GIRL ***
“Ah there, girls! How are you?”—Page
11.
 THE
LIBERTY GIRL
BY
RENA I. HALSEY
Author of “Blue Robin, the Girl Pioneer”
and “America’s Daughter”

ILLUSTRATED BY NANA FRENCH BICKFORD

BOSTON
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
 Published, August, 1919

Copyright, 1919
By Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.

All rights reserved

THE LIBERTY GIRL

Norwood Press

BERWICK & SMITH CO.

NORWOOD, MASS.
U. S. A.
 INSCRIBED,
WITH DEEP APPRECIATION,

TO

THE SONS OF LIBERTY,—

ALL THOSE SOLDIERS, SEAMEN, AND AIRMEN,

WHO HAVE HEROICALLY GIVEN OF
THEIR BEST FOR THE
BROTHERHOOD
OF MAN
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE

I “God Speed You” 11

II Giving Her Best 28
III The Liberty Girls 46
IV The Liberty Garden 60
V The Liberty Pageant 73
VI The Strange Letter 89
VII The Visit to Camp Mills 106
VIII Seven Pillars 121
IX The Little Old Lady in the Red House 133
X The Sweet-Pea Ladies 147
XI The Ride Through the Notch 164
XII Nathalie’s Liberty Boys 179
XIII “The Mountains with the Snowy
Foreheads” 194
XIV “Sons of Liberty” 211
XV The Gallery of the Gods 222
XVI Butternut Lodge 238
XVII The Cabin on the Mountain 256
XVIII The Liberty Cheer 275
XIX “The White Comrade” 288
XX The Liberty Tea 302
XXI The Funnies 322
XXII The Man in the Woods 334
XXIII A Mystery Solved 348
XXIV The Winner of the Prize 362
 ILLUSTRATIONS
“Ah there, girls! How are you?” (Page 11) Frontispiece
FACING PAGE

“My name is Liberty,

My throne is Law” 76
“Is that your dog? Oh, I love dogs!” 184
The girl found herself gazing into the sun-
tanned face of a young man in khaki 232
Nathalie bent over in anxious solicitude 260
“Oh, it is Philip, my son!” 376
THE LIBERTY GIRL
 CHAPTER I

“GOD SPEED YOU”

“Oh, Nathalie, I do believe there’s Grace Tyson in her new motor-

car,” exclaimed Helen Dame, suddenly laying her hand on her
companion’s arm as the two girls were about to cross Main Street,
the wide, tree-lined thoroughfare of the old-fashioned town of
Westport, Long Island.
Nathalie Page halted, and, swinging about, peered intently at the
brown-uniformed figure of a young girl seated at the steering-wheel
of an automobile, which was speeding quickly towards them.
Yes, it was Grace, who, in her sprightliest manner, her face aglow
from the invigorating breezes of an April afternoon, called out, “Ah
there, girls! How are you? Oh, my lucky star must have guided me,
for I have something thrilling to tell you!” As she spoke the girl
guided the car to the curb, and the next moment, with an airy
spring, had landed on the ground at their side.
With a sudden movement the uniformed figure clicked her heels
together and bent stiffly forward as her arm swung up, while her
forefinger grazed her forehead in a military salute. “I salute you,
comrades,” she said with grave formality, “at your service as a
member of the Motor Corps of America.
“Yes, girls,” she shrilled joyously, forgetting her assumed rôle in her
eagerness to tell her news, “I’m on the job, for I’m to see active
service for the United States government. I’ve just returned from an
infantry drill of the Motor Corps at Central Park, New York.
“No, I’ll be honest,” she added laughingly, in answer to the look of
amazed inquiry on the faces of her companions, “and ’fess’ that I
didn’t have the pleasure of drilling in public, for I’m a raw recruit as
yet. We recruits go through our manual of arms at one of the New
York armories, drilled by a regular army sergeant. Oh, I’ve been in
training some time, for you know I took out my chauffeur’s and
mechanician’s State licenses last winter.
“One has to own her car at this sort of government work,”—Grace’s
voice became inflated with importance,—“and be able to make her
own repairs on the road if necessary. But isn’t my new car a Jim
Dandy?” she asked, glancing with keen pride at the big gray motor,
purring contentedly at the curb. “It was a belated Christmas gift
from grandmother.
“But I tell you what, girls,” she rattled on, “I’ve been put through the
paces all right, but I’ve passed my exams with flying colors. Phew!
wasn’t the physical exam stiff!—before a regular high official of the
army medical corps. I was inoculated for typhoid, and for
paratyphoid. I’ll secretly confess that I don’t know what the last
word means. Yes, and I took the oath of allegiance to the United
States Government, administered by another army swell,—and that’s
where my Pioneer work proved O. K. And then we had the First Aid
course, too, at St. Luke’s. The head nurse, who gave us special
lessons in bandaging, said I was A No. 1; and in wigwagging, oh, I
did the two-flag business just dandy.”
“But what is your special work?” asked Nathalie, for the two girls
were somewhat surprised and bewildered by all these high-
sounding, official-like terms. To be sure, Grace had long been known
as an expert driver, but she had never shown her efficiency in any
way but by giving the girls joy-rides once in a while; yes, and once
she had driven her father to New York.
But war work, thought Nathalie, for this aristocratic-looking, sweet-
faced young girl, whose eyes gleamed merrily at you from under the
peaked army cap—with its blue band and the insignia of the Corps, a
tire surmounted by Mercury’s wings—set so jauntily on the fluffy
hair. To be sure the slim, trim figure in the army jacket, short skirt
over trousers, and high boots did have a warlike aspect, but it was
altogether too girlish and charming to be suggestive of anything but
a toy soldier, like one of the tiny painted tin things that Nathalie used
to play with when a wee tot.
“Do? Why, I am a military chauffeur,” returned Grace patronizingly,
“and in the business of war-relief work for the Government. At
present I’m to act as chauffeur to one of our four lieutenants, Miss
Gladys Merrill. Oh, she’s a dear! I have to drive her all over the city
when she is engaged on some Government errand. You should see
me studying the police maps, and then you would know what I do.
Sometimes we are called to transport some of the army officers from
the railroad station to the ferry, or to headquarters. Then we do
errands for the Red Cross, too.
“Why, the other day I helped to carry a lot of knitted things down on
the pier, to be packed in a ship bound for the other side; they were
for the soldiers at the front. We do work for the National Defense,
and for the Board of Exemption. I’m doing my ‘bit,’ even if it is a wee
one, towards winning the war,” ended the girl, with a note of
satisfaction in her voice.
“O dear, but wouldn’t I like to drive an ambulance in France! But I’ve
got to be twenty-one to do that sort of work,”—the girl sighed. “But
did I tell you that brother Fred is doing American Field Service? I had
a letter from him yesterday, and he said that he and a lot of
American boys have established a little encampment of ambulances
not far from the front-line trench. They live in what was once a
château belonging to Count Somebody or Another, but now it is
nothing but a shell.
“Oh, Fred thinks it is glorious fun,” cried the girl, with sparkling eyes.
“He has to answer roll-call at eight in the morning, and then he eats
his breakfast at a little café near. He has just black bread,—think of
that, coffee, and, yes, sometimes he has an egg. Then he has to
drill, clean his car, and—oh, but he says it’s a great sight to see the
aëroplanes constantly flying over his head, like great monsters of the
air. And sometimes he goes wild with excitement when he sees an
aërial battle between a Boche and a French airman.
“Yes, he declares it is ‘some’ life over there,” animatedly continued
Grace, “for even his rest periods are thrilling, for they have to dodge
shells, and sometimes they burst over one’s head. Several times he
thought he was done for. And at night the road near the château is
packed with hundreds of marching guns, trucks of ammunition, and
war supplies and cavalry, all on their way to the front.
“But when he goes in his ambulance after the blessés—they are the
poor wounded soldiers—it is just like day, for the sky is filled with
star-shells shooting around him in all colors, and then there is a
constant cannonading of shells and shot of all kinds. When he hears
a purr he knows it’s a Boche plane and dodges pretty lively, for if he
doesn’t ‘watch out’ a machine-gun comes sputtering down at him.
He’s awfully afraid of them because they drop bombs.
“But he says it would make your heart ache to see him when he
carries the blessés. He has to drive them from the postes de secours
—the aid-stations—to the hospitals. He has to go very slowly, and
even then you can hear the poor things groan and shriek with the
agony of being moved. And sometimes,” Grace lowered her voice
reverently, “when he goes to take them out of the ambulance he
finds a dead soldier.
“But dear me,” she continued in a more cheerful tone, “he seems to
like the life and is constantly hoping—I believe he dreams about it in
his sleep—that he’ll soon have a shot at one of those German fiends.
Yes, I think it would be gloriously exciting,” ended Grace with a half
sigh of envy.
“Gloriously exciting?” repeated Nathalie with a shudder. “Oh, Grace,
I should think you would be frightfully worried. Suppose he should
lose his life some time in the darkness of the night, alone with those
wounded soldiers? O dear,” she ended drearily, “I just wish some one
would shoot or kill the Kaiser! Sometimes I wish I could be a
Charlotte Corday. Don’t you remember how she killed Murat for the
sake of the French?”
“Why, Nathalie,” cried Helen with amused eyes, “I thought you were
a pacifist, and here you are talking of shooting people.” And the girl’s
“Ha! ha!” rang out merrily.
Nathalie’s color rose in a wave as she cried decidedly, “Helen, I’m
not a pacifist. Of course I want the Allies to win. I believe in the war
—only—only—I do not think it is necessary to send our boys across
the sea to fight.”
“But I do,” insisted Helen, “for this is God’s war, a war to give liberty
to everybody in the world, and that makes it our war. We should be
willing to fight, to give the rights and privileges of democracy to
other people, and our American boys are not slackers who let some
one else do their work.”
“Our boys! You mean my boy,” said Nathalie, with sudden bitterness.
“It’s all right for you to talk, Helen, but you haven’t a brother to go
and stand up and be mercilessly bayoneted by those Boches. And
that is what Dick will have to do.” Nathalie choked as she turned her
head away.
“Yes, Nathalie dear,” replied Helen in a softened tone, “I know it is a
terrible thing to have to give up your loved ones to be ruthlessly
shot down. But what are we going to do?” she pleaded desperately,
“we must do what is right and leave the rest to God, for, as mother
says, ‘God is in his Heaven.’ And Dick wants to go,” she ended
abruptly, “he told me so the other day.”
“Yes, that is just it,” cried Nathalie in a pitifully small voice, “and he
says that he is not going to wait to be drafted. Oh, Helen, mother
and I cannot sleep at night thinking about it!” Nathalie turned her
face away, her eyes dark and sorrowful. No, she did not mean to be
a coward, but it just rent her heart to picture Dick going about
armless, or a helpless cripple shuffling along, with either she or
Dorothy leading him.
“Oh, I would like to be a Joan of Arc,” interposed Grace at this point,
her blue eyes suddenly afire. “I think it would be great to ride in
front of an army on a white charger. And then, too,” she added more
seriously, “I think it takes more bravery to fight than to do anything
else.”
“Perhaps it does, Grace,” remarked Helen slowly, “but when it comes
to heroism, I think the mothers who give their boys to be
slaughtered for the good of their fellow-beings are the bravest—”
The girl paused quickly, for she had caught sight of Nathalie’s face,
and remorsefully felt that what she had just said only added to her
friend’s distress. “But, girls,” she went on in a brighter tone, “I have
something to tell you. I’m going to France to do my ‘bit,’ for I’m to
be stenographer to Aunt Dora. We expect to sail in a month or so.
You know that she is one of the officials in the Red Cross
organization.”
There were sudden exclamations of surprise from the girl’s two
companions, as they eagerly wanted to know all about her
unexpected piece of news. As Helen finished giving the details as to
how it had all come about, she exclaimed, with a sudden look at her
wrist-watch: “Goodness! Girls, do you know it is almost supper-time?
I’m just about starved.”
“Well, jump into the car, then,” cried Grace Tyson, “and I’ll have you
home in no time.” Her companions, pleased at the prospect of a
whirl in the new car, gladly accepted her invitation, and a few
minutes later were speeding towards the lower end of the street
where Helen and Nathalie lived.
After bidding her friends good-by, Nathalie, with a tru-al-lee, the
call-note of their Pioneer bird-group, ran lightly up the steps of the
veranda. Yes, Dick was home, for he was standing in the hall,
lighting the gas. With a happy little sigh she opened the door.
“Hello, sis,” called out Dick cheerily,—a tall well-formed youth, with
merry blue eyes,—as he caught sight of the girl in the door-way.
“Have you been on a hike?”
“Oh, no, just an afternoon at Mrs. Van Vorst’s. Nita had a lot of the
girls there—” Nathalie stopped, for an expression, a sudden gleam in
her brother’s eyes, caused her heart to give a wild leap. She drew in
her breath sharply, but before the question that was forming could
be asked, Dick waved the still flaming match hilariously above his
head as he cried, “Well, sister mine, I’ve taken the plunge, and I’ve
come off on top, for I’ve joined the Flying Corps, and I’m going to be
an army eagle!”
“Flying Corps?” repeated Nathalie dazedly. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, Blue Robin, that I’m going to be an aviator, a sky pilot,”
replied the boy jubilantly. “I made an application some time ago to
the chief signal officer at Washington. I was found an eligible
applicant, for, you know, my course in the technical school in New
York did me up fine. To-day I passed my physical examinations, and
am now enlisted in the Signal Corps of the Signal Enlisted Reserve
Corps. I’m off next week to the Military Aëronautics School at
Princeton University. It’s an eight-weeks’ course. If I put it over,—
and you bet your life I do,” Dick ground his teeth determinedly,—“I
go into training at one of the Flying Schools, and then I’ll soon be a
regular bird of the air; and if I don’t help Uncle Sam win the war,
and manage to drop a few bombs on those Fritzies, I’ll go hang!”
For one awful moment Nathalie stood silent, staring at her brother in
dumb despair. Then she turned, and with a blur in her eyes and a
tightening of her throat, blindly groped for the stairway. But no!
Dick’s hand shot out, he caught the hurrying figure in his grasp, and
the next moment Nathalie was sobbing on his breast.
“That’s all right, little sis,” exclaimed the boy with a break in his
voice, as he pressed the brown head closer. Then he cried, in an
attempt at jocularity, “Just get it all out of your system, every last
drop of that salted brine, Blue Robin, and then we’ll talk business.”
This somewhat matter-of-fact declaration acted like a cold shower-
bath on the girl, as, with a convulsive shiver, she caught her breath,
and although she burrowed deeper into the snug of her brother’s
arm her tears were stayed.
“Dick, how could you do it? Think of mother!” Then she raised her
eyes, and went on, “Oh, I can’t bear the thought of your getting ki
—” But the girl could not say the dreaded word, and again her head
went down against the rough gray of Dick’s coat.
“Well, Blue Robin, I’m afraid you have lost that cheery little tru-al-lee
of yours,” teased the boy humorously. “You’ve cried so hard you’re
eye-twisted. In the first place, I don’t intend getting killed if I can
help it. And I can’t help leaving mother. You must remember I’m a
citizen of the United States—” the boy was thinking of his first vote
cast the fall before—“and I am bound by my oath of allegiance to
the country to uphold its principles, even if it means the breaking of
my mother’s apron-strings,” he added jokingly.
“Oh, Dick, don’t try to be funny,” Nathalie managed to say somewhat
sharply, as she drew away from her brother’s arm and dropped
limply on the steps of the stairs, in such an attitude of hopeless
despair that Dick was at the end of his tether to know what to say.
He stared down at the girl, unconsciously rubbing his hand through
his hair, a trick the boy had when perplexed.
Suddenly a bit of a smile leaped into his eyes as he cried, in a
hopelessly resigned tone, “All right, sis, seeing that you feel this way
about it I’ll just send in my resignation. It will let the boys know I’ve
laid down on my job, for if you and mother are going to howl like
two cats, a fellow can’t do a thing but stay at home and be a sissy, a
baby-tender, a dish-washer-er-er—”
“Oh, Dick, don’t talk nonsense,” broke in Nathalie sharply. “I didn’t
say that you were not to go, but,—why—oh, I just can’t help feeling
awfully bad when I read all those terrible things in the paper.” Her
voice quivered pathetically as she finished.
“Well, don’t read them, then,” coolly rejoined Dick. “Just steer clear
of all that hysterical gush and brace up. My job is to serve my
country,—she wants me. By Jove, before she gets out of this hole
she’ll need every mother’s son of us. And I’ve got to do it in the best
way I can, by enlisting before the draft comes. I’ll not only have a
chance to do better work, a prospect of quicker promotion, but, if
you want to look at the sordid end of it, I’ll get more pay. And as to
being killed, as you wailed, if you and mother will insist upon seeing
it black, an aviator’s chance of life is ten to one better—if he’s on to
his job—than that of the fellow on the ground. So cheer up, Blue
Robin. I’m all beat hollow, for I’ve been trying to cheer up mother
for the last hour.”
“Oh, what does mother say?” asked a very faint voice, just as if the
girl did not know how her mother felt, and had been feeling for
some time.
“Say! Gee whiz! I don’t know what she would have said if she had
voiced her sentiments,” replied Dick resignedly. “But the worst of the
whole business was that she took it out in weeping about a tank of
tears; all over my best coat, too,” he added ruefully. “You women are
enough to make a fellow go stiff.
“Now see here, Blue Robin, don’t disappoint me!” suddenly cried the
lad, as he stared appealingly into his sister’s brown eyes. “Why, I
thought that you would be my right-hand man. I knew mother would
make a time at first, but you,—I thought you had grit; you, a
Pioneer, too. Don’t you know, girl—” added Dick, rubbing the back of
his hand quickly across his eyes, “that I’ve got to go? Don’t you
forget that. I’m on the job, every inch of it, but, thunderation, I’m no
more keen to go ‘over there’ and have those Hun devils cut me up
like sausage, than you or mother. But I’m a man and I’ve got to live
up to the business of being a man, and not a mollycoddle.”
But Nathalie had suddenly come to her senses. Perhaps it was the
brush of the boy’s hand across his eyes, or the quivering note in his
voice, but she roused. She had been selfish; instead of crying like a
ninny she should have cheered. “Oh, Dick,” she exclaimed contritely,
standing up and facing him suddenly, “I’m all wrong. I didn’t mean
to cry, and I wouldn’t have either,” she explained excusingly, “if you
had only let me go up-stairs.
“No, Dick, I would not have you be a slacker, or a mollycoddle, or
wash the dishes,” she added with a faint attempt at a smile, “and we
haven’t any babies to tend. Yes, old boy, I don’t want you to lie
down in the traces, so let’s shake on it, and I’ll try to brace up
mother, too,” added the girl, as she held out her hand to her brother.
“Now that’s the stuff, Nat, old girl,” cried the boy with gleaming
eyes, as he took the girl’s hand and held it tightly, “and while I’m
fighting to uphold the family honor and glory,—remember father was
a Rough Rider,—you stay with dear old mumsie. Keep her cheered
up, and see that everything is made easy for her. Do all you can to
take my place here at home. Yes, Blue Robin, you be the home
soldier. Gee whiz, you be the home guard!” added the boy in a
sudden burst of inspiration.
“The home guard! Yes, that’s what I’ll be,” cried the girl, her eyes
lighting with a sudden glow. “And then I’ll be doing my bit, won’t I?
I’ll cheer up mother, and do all I can,” she added resolutely; “and
don’t worry any more, Dick, for now,”—the girl drew a long breath,
“I’ll be on the job as well as you.”
And then Nathalie, with a wave of her hand at the boy as he stood
gazing up at her with his eyes fired with loyal determination, hurried
up the stairs, straight on and up to the very top of the house to her
usual weeping-place, for, oh, those hateful tears would not be
restrained, and if she did not have her cry out she would strangle!
Ah, here she was in her den, the attic. Dimly she reached out her
hand and pulled the little wooden rocker out from the wall and
slumped into it, and a minute later, with her face buried in the fold
of her arm, as it rested on the little sewing-table, she was weeping
unrestrainedly.
Presently she gave a sudden start, raised her head and listened, and
then was on her feet, for, oh, that was her mother’s step,—she was
coming up after her. Oh, why hadn’t she waited until she had a hold
on herself. The next moment the little wooden door with the padlock
opened, and Mrs. Page was standing in the doorway gazing down at
her.
“Why—oh, mother!” Nathalie cried in surprise and wonder, for her
mother was smiling. The girl’s eyes bulged out from her tear-stained
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