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“Mice have their good points,” put in Miss Dawlish, ’07, the kindergarten teacher. Emmie had been seated next to her at the luncheon and liked her immediately. She had a pleasantly freckled face, her ginger hair braided around and around like a crown. “We made pets of them in our classroom. The children built a little cage for them.”

Maud wafted that aside. “Mice, perhaps, but not Germans. Do you know, they say they give you five hundred francs and a Croix de Guerre if you shoot one. I, for one, mean to get a revolver and pot as many as I can.”

“Mice?” asked Miss Cooper.

“No, Germans,” said Maud, rolling her eyes at Liza.

They seemed to have rather departed from the high tone of a moment before. Emmie looked to Mrs. Rutherford, wondering when she would take charge, but Mrs. Rutherford was busy with her notes, shuffling through a pile of lists and papers, unconcerned by the sniping among her recruits.

In desperation, Emmie clapped her hands together. “Has anyone thought of getting a concert together? A charity concert?” Charity concerts were one thing she knew how to do. As she knew better than anyone, the best way not to think was to keep as busy as possible. “We could hold one for the other passengers. There are an awful lot of people on the ship, aren’t there? We could have a concert to raise money for the French wounded. It wouldn’t need to be anything elaborate. Just a few airs and recitations. Kate, remember Henry V? You could do the St. Crispin’s Day speech! ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .’”

“Wouldn’t it be band of sisters?” said Kate wryly, but at least she’d stopped glowering at Julia.

“Ugh,” said Maud. “You aren’t going to ask us each to do a turn, are you? It would be too embarrassing.”

“Oh, no, we wouldn’t want to take over the program. Just organize it,” said Emmie, improvising madly, feeling the mood of the room lightening. There was nothing like a concert for pulling people together. The others were perking up nicely, everyone starting to think what they knew, what they could do. “We could ask those nice Harvard men to sing glees. Maybe you might ask them? I’m sure they would listen to you.”

“If you think it would be useful . . .” said Maud, but Emmie could tell she was itching to get out there and put her persuasive powers to use.

Emmie looked around the circle of women; she didn’t know them yet as individuals, but they felt familiar anyway, familiar as Smith women, familiar as all the committee women and settlement house volunteers with whom she had worked over the years, women who had helped her drape bunting and serve hot meals and put on comic operettas. She felt a surge of warmth for them all. “There must be other people on the boat with all sorts of talents. We could put out an open call for performers!”

“It will have to be before we enter the war zone,” Mrs. Rutherford cautioned, looking up from her notes. “Once we cross that line, there’ll be no more music after dark. That will be . . . a week from now.”

“We could call it One Last Night of Music,” suggested Miss Cooper, and then looked alarmed at her own words. “I mean, not the last night of music forever. Just the last night of music on the ship.”

“Yes, yes. Ava, if you would come with me?” Mrs. Rutherford gathered up her files, gesturing to Dr. Stringfellow, who served as assistant director of the Unit as well as their primary medical authority. “And Dr. Pruyn?”

Emmie felt her tension lighten as Julia turned to go. She loved Julia, she did. They were first cousins, practically the same age—except that Julia had been born six months earlier, first in that as she was in everything. Emmie had always suspected that she bored and frustrated Julia, but it was hard to tell. Julia kept herself to herself, twisting back her emotions as tightly and adroitly as she did the golden coil of hair at the back of her head, not a strand out of place. Julia’s mother, Aunt May, was just the same way. Emmie had always been a little terrified of Aunt May, who lived an exotic, continental existence, returning to New York every so often to drop Julia at the rambling brownstone on East Thirty-Fourth Street “to be a sister for Emmaline.”

And they were sisters—of sorts. Sisters who loved each other even when they didn’t understand each other very well, which was most of the time.

Feeling guilty, Emmie called softly, “You will sing at the concert, won’t you, Julia? No one has a voice like yours.”

Her cousin gave her a curt nod of acknowledgment before following Dr. Stringfellow out of the room.

Emmie could feel Kate looking at her. “She means well.”

“Hmm,” said Kate, which was Kate’s way of disagreeing entirely.

“Come,” said Emmie, hooking her arm through Kate’s, feeling obscurely cheered. She knew that “hmm” of old. It had been six years, but Kate was still the same Kate, and there was something reassuring in that. They said blood was thicker than water, but she had always felt more at home with Kate than with Julia, even if Julia came of the same Knickerbocker stock and Kate from what her father called “those people.” “I’ll show you our cabin. Don’t expect terribly much. It really is pretty dire.”

“It can’t be worse than my room in Boston,” said Kate as Emmie pushed open the door.

“I thought it was a very nice room,” lied Emmie, groping her way through the darkness until she bumped into a berth, sitting down with a thump that made the springs squeak. The portholes had been boarded over, casting the cabin into permanent gloom.

“It was a dreadful room,” said Kate, and suddenly they were both laughing, as if they were eighteen again, and not twenty-eight and on their way to a war zone. “Be grateful it was, or I’d never have agreed to come.”

“I’m so glad you did,” said Emmie honestly. “It makes it all feel less . . .”

“Mad?” suggested Kate, lowering herself carefully onto her own berth.

“Daunting,” said Emmie.

They were quiet for a moment, the dark room close around them. Why didn’t you ever visit? Emmie wanted to ask. Why didn’t you write?

They had never stopped being friends; they had simply stopped being friends who saw one another. She had known Kate was busy, that Kate had to get her own living, but she couldn’t help feeling a bit hurt all the same. Her mother would have been so happy to help, to give Kate a job as her own secretary. They might have gone on as they had been.

But, of course, all things changed. Emmie knew that. It had been an impulse that had taken her to Kate’s boardinghouse in Boston. They needed a woman who could drive and who spoke French, and Kate could do both.