We walked the floor until our legs gave out and we had to sit down perforce . Mother knitted away as steadily as clockwork and pretended to be calm and serene -- pretended so well that we were all deceived and envious until the next day , when I caught her ravelling out four inches of her sock . She had knit that far past where the heel should have begun ! `` It was twelve before father came home . He stood in the doorway and looked at us and we looked at him . We did not dare ask him what the news was . Then he said that it was Laurier who had ` done nothing ' in the West , and that the Union Government was in with a big majority . Gertrude clapped her hands . I wanted to laugh and cry , mother 's eyes flashed with their old-time starriness and Susan emitted a queer sound between a gasp and a whoop . `` This will not comfort the Kaiser much , ' she said . `` Then we went to bed , but were too excited to sleep . Really , as Susan said solemnly this morning , ` Mrs. Dr. dear , I think politics are too strenuous for women . ' '' 31st December 1917 `` Our fourth War Christmas is over . We are trying to gather up some courage wherewith to face another year of it . Germany has , for the most part , been victorious all summer . And now they say she has all her troops from the Russian front ready for a ` big push ' in the spring . Sometimes it seems to me that we just can not live through the winter waiting for that . `` I had a great batch of letters from overseas this week . Shirley is at the front now , too , and writes about it all as coolly and matter-of-factly as he used to write of football at Queen 's . Carl wrote that it had been raining for weeks and that nights in the trenches always made him think of the night of long ago when he did penance in the graveyard for running away from Henry Warren 's ghost .
Carl 's letters are always full of jokes and bits XXXXX fun .
about as before from in of out that to until